Alert -- Pluto Science Data/Image Return to be Slow

a reply to: EternalSolace
I do, I also remember the nasty screechy dial up noise and how, if you were a bit tech savvy, you could tell when your connection was being diverted, rerouted etc. Those were the days!!!

originally posted by: EternalSolace

originally posted by: ngchunter

originally posted by: GaryN
a reply to: Aliensun

With Mars and Phobos, the delay of releasing data was handed off to Malin & co. and NAS/JPL told us, "Heck, our hands are tied, the data can no longer be immediately released because of his contract." --What a crock that was.

This is how the Military/Industrial complex works. They get the data,

...at a rate of 125 bytes a second. 125 bytes, not kilobytes.

People don't remember dial up and taking 30 minutes to download a 3MB song...

Lol, why would people even bother downloading songs at that speed?

originally posted by: JadeStar

originally posted by: EternalSolace

originally posted by: ngchunter

originally posted by: GaryN
a reply to: Aliensun

With Mars and Phobos, the delay of releasing data was handed off to Malin & co. and NAS/JPL told us, "Heck, our hands are tied, the data can no longer be immediately released because of his contract." --What a crock that was.

This is how the Military/Industrial complex works. They get the data,

...at a rate of 125 bytes a second. 125 bytes, not kilobytes.

People don't remember dial up and taking 30 minutes to download a 3MB song...

Lol, why would people even bother downloading songs at that speed?

LOL according to your stats NASA is downloading data at 1000th that speed.

You work with what ya got!!!

a reply to: JadeStar

Because back in the 90's a 56k modem was the best one could hope for, haha.

I just make the comparison because it's really an easy concept to understand why any data coming from Pluto is going to come at a snails pace.

originally posted by: EternalSolace
a reply to: JadeStar

Because back in the 90's a 56k modem was the best one could hope for, haha.

I just make the comparison because it's really an easy concept to understand why any data coming from Pluto is going to come at a snails pace.

56k is screaming fast compared to the data link to New Horizons. 56 times faster than New Horizons.

a reply to: EternalSolace

Yes dial up was 52k for the most part, but I even remember 26k as well, I never had as low as JadeStar is suggesting, which is 125 bytes though. not sure if that would even work on a lan.

originally posted by: Aliensun

originally posted by: ngchunter

originally posted by: Aliensun

originally posted by: ngchunter

originally posted by: Aliensun
a reply to: ngchunter

You're not serious are you in treating us like kids in this serious business?

Well, you're acting like an ignorant kid. Clearly you don't understand how radio transmissions work over incredibly long distances or how signal strength affects transmission rate. This is basic spaceflight, not a conspiracy.

Strangely enough, you want to zero in on this time lag that virtually EVERYBODY understands.

It's not really about the "time lag," it's about bandwidth and signal strength limitations caused by the distance. If all the data could arrive at once with ONLY the light delay as a consideration it wouldn't be much of an issue. We'd have all the data within a day. That is not the case here, but the limitations I just described ARE the subject of the thread. If that's not what you want to talk about then perhaps this isn't the right thread for you. This IS the primary discussion.

There you go again, trying to shift the discussion away from the point.

No, I'm not, that IS the subject of this thread.

The true subject of the thread was not the problem of telemetry limits but the fact that some people, so rocketman says, will be unwilling to accept the official explanations and that the announcement beforehand was an preemptive strike which some of us saw as suspicious given other efforts going back at least to the Viking missions to suppress, ignore and disclaim evidence contrary to an official stance.

Why do you think it's suspicious?! It's basic physics and spaceflight! The radio signal out that far is very weak and so the transmission has to be performed slowly. It will take a long time to download the data from the encounter, it's not a conspiracy so a preemptive explanation to dampen down expectations for the rate of the data is completely called for!

The recent lack of a full release of info on light spots on Ceres is another issue that points out that supposedly innocent, scientific data is being censored from the general public if not other members in the scientific community not directly connected to such programs.

Data has been pouring out of the Dawn mission, I don't know what you're talking about.

Which begs the question, if they do find something alien how will they know if it is alien or just a " JPEG artifact"?
Until we have a better way of transmitting data we are basically just wasting time and money sending probes to far away places because we can never be sure that what we are seeing is real or just a "JPEG artifact"

isn`t it a bit like sending a monkey to the moon with a pencil and a piece of paper and then trying to figure out what the surface of the moon looks like based on the picture the monkey drew?

a reply to: Tardacus

We know what compression artifacts look like. It's a known quantity and a necessary compromise. No one knows what errors a monkey would introduce or the amount of fidelity returned.

Let me tell you all a story
About a camera named LORRI
Yeah LORRI was a cam
On a big space probe

~~~

Yeah, that was bad, but that song it stuck in my head.

You can find the latest LORRI camera images at pluto.jhuapl.edu...

The latest ones at the moment are from June 25th, and hopefully there will be more images before, during, and after the closest flyby.

Latest image, at 100% scale crop:


Zoomed x8 with pixel-resize:


The industrious folk at the Unmanned Spaceflight Forum have already been creating global maps and projections using the latest data.

originally posted by: Jonjonj

originally posted by: JadeStar

originally posted by: EternalSolace

originally posted by: ngchunter

originally posted by: GaryN
a reply to: Aliensun

With Mars and Phobos, the delay of releasing data was handed off to Malin & co. and NAS/JPL told us, "Heck, our hands are tied, the data can no longer be immediately released because of his contract." --What a crock that was.

This is how the Military/Industrial complex works. They get the data,

...at a rate of 125 bytes a second. 125 bytes, not kilobytes.

People don't remember dial up and taking 30 minutes to download a 3MB song...

Lol, why would people even bother downloading songs at that speed?

LOL according to your stats NASA is downloading data at 1000th that speed.

You work with what ya got!!!

True but data from the far reaches of the solar system is worth waiting for. Was N-Sync or whatever the hell people listened to back then THAT good?

originally posted by: Aliensun And then, there were the discoveries decades ago of pulsars and then quasars that were withheld from the general public.

Lol, really? Link please? Because AFAIK every pulsar and quasar discovered had a paper written about it, sometimes multiple ones.

originally posted by: EternalSolace
a reply to: JadeStar

Because back in the 90's a 56k modem was the best one could hope for, haha.

I just make the comparison because it's really an easy concept to understand why any data coming from Pluto is going to come at a snails pace.

It's a good comparison. It will be great when we're using lasers to send data back at 21st century internet bandwidth and speeds

originally posted by: Tardacus
Which begs the question, if they do find something alien how will they know if it is alien or just a " JPEG artifact"?
Until we have a better way of transmitting data we are basically just wasting time and money sending probes to far away places because we can never be sure that what we are seeing is real or just a "JPEG artifact"

isn`t it a bit like sending a monkey to the moon with a pencil and a piece of paper and then trying to figure out what the surface of the moon looks like based on the picture the monkey drew?

Nope. Because every image compression, or extrapolation technique has artifacts which are well known and well defined by scientists before the spacecraft ever leaves the earth so the people who work with such imagery are well aware of what they look like.

And fwiw, Pluto would be one of the least likely places I'd think anyone would go searching for aliens... I can imagine "Come to the frigid dwarf planet Pluto!! Which is more or less like every other frigid dwarf planet except it's called PLUTO!"

oh wow it must be good,
as this is a preemptive "nothing alien
to see here strike".

all this talk of 56k modems makes me feel old! I remember a 1200 baud modem - and it was cutting edge in it's day! It was used pretty much exclusively to access bulletin boards! Thank god for Sir Tim Berners-Lee!!!

a reply to: JimOberg

I think I have to go with other's assessment of this; what a wonderful way to try to pull the wool over our eyes1 This whole system is suspicious as hell!!!

Firstly (after reading your link).. the machine can't download data and operate its camera at the same time? Sounds like the guy who can't chew gum and walk at the same time!

Even with old technology used right here on Earth, we have systems that can "time slice" multiplex computations fast enough to do several things at once. There was even a big deal made over this some 20 years ago when Mac's could do the time slice thing, and Windows couldn't...lead to a major change in Windows.

Today we have processors that are capable of supporting several truly independent and simultaneous threads...my I7 can actually do 8 of these...by the way, I am aware that they didn't use an I7 in that robot, but there are quite a number of very low power multiple core processors available, and have been for at least a decade, or more.

Or perhaps Hew Horizons is more than 15 years old?

Next on my list is the compression artifacts. They aren't seriously sending back JPEGs are they? I mean they are just about useless for astronomy, and drastically limit the amount of image information available...after all they are only 24bit color...arranged as three planes of 8 bits.

And the jpeg compression...might as well think of it as a data corrupter! That compression method is intended for simple computer graphics...like the images on this page, and not for serious imaging.

As I am designing my telescope robot, I found that virtually ALL astronomical data is saved and transferred in "FITS" files (Flexible Image Transfer System) which transfers image data, like what is derived from a CCD as multiple arrays of data that can be any "bit depth" (uses multiple arrays to build color).

And about that CCD...I presume it is BW as opposed to color. But, WHY only 12 bits? Again, this must be an OLD machine...the CCD I've selected is a 48bit system, in full color...16 bits for each color (R G B). This actually yields a vision system that is a bit more than I can use...It will detect magnitude differences that are theoretically less than CCD is physically capable of (25,000 electron full well...65,000+ discrete states).

Then we are told that this is only a 1MP device? Even SOHO is better than that!

Now about that data transfer...why is it only 1KB/s that is so slow that even a Commodore 64 would fall asleep during that. But, I suspect it is because of the last gen technology that they are using here on Earth for deep space communication...70 meter dishes? Really? Some low frequency stuff there, eh? (based on wavelengths)

I know you don't have many of the real answers about all this, but, it does seem a bit "off" that they would say all this when the technology is decades better that what they claim is deployed...all I can think is that this spacecraft is very old (in spacecraft terms), and should have been forgotten in favor of a truly modern system.

a reply to: tanka418

The enormous distance to Pluto, as well as New Horizon's instruments being body-mounted, seem to be the main factors in the slow data transmission rate: en.wikipedia.org...

New Horizons will record scientific instrument data to its solid-state buffer at each encounter, then transmit the data to Earth. Data storage is done on two low-power solid-state recorders (one primary, one backup) holding up to 8 gigabytes each. Because of the extreme distance from Pluto and the Kuiper belt, only one buffer load at those encounters can be saved. This is because New Horizons will have left the vicinity of Pluto (or future target object) by the time it takes to transmit the buffer load back to Earth (45 to 90 days).

Part of the reason for the delay between the gathering and transmission of data is because all of the New Horizons instrumentation is body-mounted. In order for the cameras to record data, the entire probe must turn, and the one-degree-wide beam of the high-gain antenna will almost certainly not be pointing toward Earth. Previous spacecraft, such as the Voyager program probes, had a rotatable instrumentation platform (a "scan platform") that could take measurements from virtually any angle without losing radio contact with Earth. New Horizons‍ '​ elimination of excess mechanisms was implemented to save weight, shorten the schedule, and improve reliability to achieve a 15-year lifetime.

It's only because of sites like ATS and the ridiculous conspiracies therein that they even have to issue such a 'disclaimer' explaining the limitations of transferring data from such immense distances; Most people in the real world, with functioning brains wouldn't need for it to be spelled out for them...

...And then to turn the 'disclaimer' into a conspiracy in and of itself? *shakes head*

Some of you people really need to get outside more, and take a break from the conspiracy sites.

originally posted by: wildespace
a reply to: tanka418

The enormous distance to Pluto, as well as New Horizon's instruments being body-mounted, seem to be the main factors in the slow data transmission rate

You are not doing NASA and New Horizons any favors.

It would almost seem that not only is the device old..as old as my two "Pentium Pro" servers (now retired for almost 20 years). And was designed by a team that had no business designing anything at all.

And while I am very sure that a lot of very good data will acquired with this machine, a modern system would do much better.

But, that data rate issue...pure BS! I know Pluto is along way, but, that distance affects all radio signals the same, and this is a case where talking slower won't make it understood any better...kind of like when people think that IF the talk slower, someone who doesn't speak the language will magically understand...it never works.

The reality is that that data can/could be transferred at at least DSL speeds.