Reply To: What if?

[SteveInCO]

And here’s the irony…New Frontiers sent back more data on Jupiter (and had far and away the best camera ever sent there) than it will for Pluto, because near Jupiter it was able to transmit much faster, and it could therefore flush its memory buffer and refill it a few times. Pluto is roughly seven times as far away as Jupiter (the ratio is even higher, when Earth is on the side of its orbit closest to Jupiter), so the signal strength is 1/49th there, which is 17dB of additional “free space loss” which means a reduced bandwidth… which here on earth means shitty internet, out there it means waiting forever for data to come in.

Anyhow, all that data from Jupiter? Scientists loved it… but the public paid it no mind whatsoever.

From a dot on a photographic plate, to a picture like this…in a matter of days. It’s still making my head spin, and I do a little happy dance when I think “now we actually know what Pluto looks like. This isn’t fake, this isn’t an artist’s impression, this is actually Pluto. It has mountains made of hard-frozen ice, it has snow fields, it’s mostly pinkish…and we’ve named something after Clyde Tombaugh at last, as his ashes went whizzing by.”