The Pluto Express - New Horizons Project

[csv8]

https://au.news.yahoo.com/technology...-plutos-heart/

[Moby Vic]

Originally Posted by csv8

https://au.news.yahoo.com/technology...-plutos-heart/

Australia's water problem solved!

[In Focus]

Long way to go...

Apparently, there is plenty of water in the solar system if you know where to look. Unlike in the movies, there's no real need for aliens to invade earth to steal our water.

[2011G6E]

Originally Posted by MITCHAY

The thing is the average person does not appreciate what it all means. They see no point in it all. The very fact they are able to do it all means something to me.

We're talking about something that apart from being able to build the thing at all, they need to build it in time to fit a launch window that falls in line with a timeline we have no control over. They have one shot at it, it either works or doesn't. I find that almost unbelievable.

Exactly. And once it's gone, it's gone...no hardware upgrades once it's on it's way.
I remember the two Voyager probes having tiny (by todays standards) computer memories, but they kept coming up with novel ways to re-write software upgrades to make the programs as small as possible to allow for the small computer memory while still being better than the software it was replacing as they transmitted it to the probes as the years went on.
Ingenious stuff! It would be the same as still having an old IBM 386 computer, but managing to make it run...somehow...on Windows 8, without adding any extra memory or hard drives...
Imagine being on the team that was given new software to upgrade the computer on Voyager 1 and 2 and being told "Now pare it down so it fits into a memory of 68kb".
(This is from a NASA site with Q&A's about Voyager)

There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.
Computer Command System (CCS) - 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory.
Flight Data System (FDS) - 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each
Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) - 18-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each.
According to my calulations, that's a total of about 68KB,

Mind boggling...

To the whiners who always pop up on social media wringing their hands and saying "But how could the money have been spent on Earth better than watsing it on this?", I always reply that this mission cost $700 million...that's literally nothing in the worlds economy today. Greece owes half a TRILLION dollars...spend $700 million in Africa and it would be "absorbed" in a week or two and nothing would be there to show for it. You probably couldn't even build one well equipped modern hospital for that amount of money.
Not to mention that the total world spend on space exploration is a tiny tiny percentage of the world military budget.
I think one figure was that the Mars "Curiosity" rover project cost the same as about 13 hours of the worlds military spending...you tell me which is more worthwhile...

Now lets all celebrate and sit back to see what else New Horizons turns up out there in the Keiper Belt where other objects the same size or larger than Pluto are floating around...

[Moby Vic]

Now you've got me wondering what the hard drive is like on the Voyager probes. Have they been spinning all these years?

[2011G6E]

Originally Posted by Moby Vic

Now you've got me wondering what the hard drive is like on the Voyager probes. Have they been spinning all these years?

Pretty sure they didn't have hard drives...would have been way too big and heavy (and fragile) back then. Just hard ROM and chips for memory.

[mik]

amazing they can send a satellite such a distance with such accuracy,

interesting stuff looking at the space distance,
i stumbled across a little representation of the distances in space last week, it equates the moon to one pixel, and you scroll across through the solar system in scale, and distance counter at the bottom of the page.

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/...larsystem.html

[zilo]

Originally Posted by mik

amazing they can send a satellite such a distance with such accuracy,

Doesn't have to be too accurate...that's what booster jets are for.....

plenty of course corrections over 10 years.

[Moby Vic]

Originally Posted by mik

amazing they can send a satellite such a distance with such accuracy,

interesting stuff looking at the space distance,
i stumbled across a little representation of the distances in space last week, it equates the moon to one pixel, and you scroll across through the solar system in scale, and distance counter at the bottom of the page.

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/...larsystem.html

Douglas Adams put it best:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.