6.25 gigabytes from 3 billion miles away

November 1, 2016 4:32 PM

How NASA Got Every Last Piece of Pluto Data Down From New Horizons
posted by Brandon Blatcher (16 comments total)

That is holy shit amazing.

New Horizons is equipped with seven different instruments—multi-spectral imagers, particle sniffers, dust collectors. Together, they collected 6.25 gigabytes of data. You could download (legally, of course) a movie that size in a few minutes. But New Horizons is 3 billion miles away. Bit by bit, the New Horizons ground team collected the flyby data over 469 days.

I will do my level best to never ever ever again complain about how long it takes an election thread to load or an album to download.

New Horizons’ engineers had to calculate exactly how many seconds it would take for the probe to reach Pluto. And then instruct the computer with things like, “At 299,791,044 seconds after New Horizons has left Earth, roll 32 degrees, pitch 15 degrees, and yaw 256 degrees, and activate the Ralph imager for .25 seconds.”

AYFKM. Amazing.
posted by rtha at 5:50 PM on November 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Right?! All this was programmed to done automatically and it largely seems to have worked. I do wonder if there's something that missed or wished they had taken a longer look at it.

But still. Ridiculously amazing.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:56 PM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

It wasn't all pre-programmed; it was being dynamically refigured right up to the last minute as opportunities became available and the guidance became clearer. But it was also all done with a 6 hour or so lightspeed turnaround, so as the encounter got near things had to be frozen in place and allowed to run their course, particularly since NH had to do its science programme with its antenna not directed toward Earth. That's why that "all's well" signal after the flyby was so important; any little thing gone wrong, collision with a micrometeroid or bad program instruction, and we would just never have heard from it again. But when we did hear from it it was clear in that very moment that NH had completed its science programme and was ready to return the data to us.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:47 PM on November 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

An idea for the next impossible-difficulty game: program a space robot with minimal bandwidth and limited memory light-hours away.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:49 PM on November 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

And as a comparison for how hard this is, the ESO lost Schiaparelli on Mars due to an engine malfunction, and NASA has had to deal with two Juno glitches in two weeks forcing alternative mission plans.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:55 PM on November 1, 2016

An idea for the next impossible-difficulty game: program a space robot with minimal bandwidth and limited memory light-hours away.

Eh, it'd probably just be easier to make it self-reproducing and autonomous. You just have to be sure to give it really specific limitations, like "Absolutely do not under any circumstances fail not to neglect to process Io's entire mass into an army of bristling warbots and then return to Earth to exterminate humanity."
posted by No-sword at 7:40 PM on November 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

The download could probably have gone faster, but they had to carefully write code that, once a day at the exact moment required, would decline the Windows 10 update.
posted by zompist at 10:46 PM on November 1, 2016 [28 favorites]

An idea for the next impossible-difficulty game: program a space robot with minimal bandwidth and limited memory light-hours away.


I think Kerbal Space Program has a plugin for this.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:44 AM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think Kerbal Space Program has a plugin for this.
Yep. KOS combined with RemoteTech will simulate this. KOS also gives you a truly terrible programming language to use as well as very tiny storage space for code.
posted by WaylandSmith at 1:38 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

 → a truly terrible programming language to use as well as very tiny storage space for code.

Sounds like FORTRAN-IV on punch cards. Challenge accepted.
posted by scruss at 6:03 AM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

"The images showed vast glaciers, mountains made of water ice, plains of frozen nitrogen, atmospheric haze layers, cryogenic volcanoes, and geologic evidence that Pluto has been tectonically active for 4.5 billion years. Plus surprises—like Charon’s 600-mile minimum equatorial canyon—from each of Pluto’s five satellites."

Does this data set finally settle the "is Pluto REALLY REALLY a planet" question?
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:21 AM on November 2, 2016

Does this data set finally settle the "is Pluto REALLY REALLY a planet" question?

No.
posted by puffyn at 9:23 AM on November 2, 2016

By which I mean : for the geologically minded, of course Pluto is a planet.

For the fuss pot astronomers who have opinions about planets not being part of clouds of similar objects (the kuiper belt, also Ceres in the asteroid belt), sorry, Pluto is still too small and too close to its neighbors.

For planetary scientists, Pluto is of course super awesome and yes you should care about all of the non-planets in the solar system too. Because Pluto -- my goodness, what a world!
posted by puffyn at 9:29 AM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Since this is about Pluto, I'm going to have to post this again: The Music Tapes - For the Planet Pluto

New Horizons should have had some way of beaming that track to the planet. It gets lonely out there, and the least we could have done is sung to it.

♫ rum ditty ditty dum chum tum, rum ditty ditty dum chum tum …♫
posted by scruss at 4:19 PM on November 2, 2016

We would have been better if in January we had allowed journalists to say, "with all due respect, are you insane?"
posted by Talez at 6:33 PM on November 2, 2016

Because Pluto -- my goodness, what a world!

Sorry, the International Federation of Technical Classifiers Against Romance and Adventure (IFTCARA) have determined that Pluto is not a world. You may refer to it as a "dwarf worldlet" if necessary, but this is deprecated and will be banned in 2018. The approved term that will be supported going forward is "Worthless space junk that probably nobody cares about, ugh, I can't even."
posted by No-sword at 1:24 AM on November 3, 2016