Beyond this horizon

by

by Doctor Science

On July 20, 1969, my family returned to our house in Champaign, IL, from a year in France, where my father had been a Fulbright Scholar. I was twelve, my brother was ten. I remember we were excited, wondering what changes we’d see after our year away — and it was like one of those Twilight Zone episodes, where you wake up and everyone has vanished, all that’s left is a crumpled newspaper blowing down Main Street.

We’d been traveling for months at this point, so we’d kind of lost track of what was going on in the world, and why the streets would be deserted in mid-afternoon. Suddenly we remembered: “Right! it’s the moon landing!”

So I remember being in the house, eating pizza and watching Walter Cronkite on our little black & white TV, seated among the boxes being brought up from the basement where they’d been stored while the house was rented.

On the evening of July 16, 1994, I went to a college Astronomy Club to talk to people and look through their telescopes, to see if we could see any part of the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter. Of course, it being New Jersey, it started to rain about an hour before impact and rained steadily for the next 2 days. So I went home and Mister Doctor and I downloaded images as they were posted to various newsgroups and to the fledgling World Wide Web. Or at least we tried — this was the first news event I recall that broke parts of the Internet due to high image traffic. I mean, the JPL comet home page got almost a quarter million “hits” on one day alone (July 20) — that was pretty heady stuff!

Today, I’m tracking New Horizon’s location, and following Emily Lakdawalla and Phil Plait, and boogeying to Pluto music. And every time we get a new image of Pluto, it’s the best image we’ve ever had.

Pluto1

This morning’s image of Pluto, taken yesterday. The pictures we get tomorrow, from today’s flyby? will be *incredible*.

I love living in the future.

Another example: Sasquan, the World SF Convention, says it’s taking place in “Spokane, Washington, USA, Earth”. This is not just being cute, because the membership breakdown includes:

Sasquan-numbers

That’s “Space — Earth Orbit — 1”, because Dr. Kjell Lindgren will be attending via remote link, from the International Space Station.

We’re getting there.

24 thoughts on “Beyond this horizon”

  2. It’s a little different from your living room, though. The max level of illumination on Pluto corresponds to the average level of a decent-sized room with no windows or doors, illuminated by a single light bulb of 60-100W.
    If you’re standing on Pluto at high noon, then: right before you freeze to death, you’re probably going to be able to see some things, but you’re not going to have enough solar illumination to read, because (unlike your living room) there is no place close enough to the source of light to read. It is, in other words, uniformly illuminated, and dimly.
    Which is not to quibble the basic point. Just to point out that it’s not quite as bright as you’d think, given the calculations.
    Which are pretty easy, actually, the inverse square law being what it is.
    Still: roughly 100 times as well-illuminated as the Earth is, at night, by the light of a full moon.

  6. It’s just SO sad that the Weekly World News is no longer around, to tell us of any WWII bombers, Elvis, or geological formations shaped like Bat Boy that are found on Pluto.

  13. OK, we made it thru the system. Anybody got an estimate of the time that pictures and other data will be arriving?

  15. This old post by Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society had a schedule of the data downloads:
    http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html
    Some new pictures are coming down through this week into Monday. There are a few flyby photos available already (some magnificent pictures of Charon and a closeup of gigantic ice mountains on Pluto). These will just be some highlights, with lossy compression, so there will be some JPEG-style artifacts in the images.
    After that, there’s a pause for the rest of the summer in which the probe is mostly sending back non-image data, and then in September they start sending back the whole image set, first in lossy-compressed form (which will take 10 weeks) and then at full quality (which will take a whole year). The signal from the distance of Pluto is so weak that it makes the data rate extremely slow.

  18. I don’t know, but basically every prominent post about a space mission on the big social networks now gets a crowd of people insisting that it’s a hoax.
    The people making the most noise of this sort on Google+ at the moment are a crowd of apparently sincere flat-earthers. Their own feeds are a strange mixture of left-wing, right-wing and unclassifiable conspiracy theories (was JFK murdered because he was about to expose the flat earth??) with a large admixture of antisemitism and, lately, defiant Confederate flag-waving. Who would have thought!

  20. For things that go beyond Earth’s magnetosphere, you probably want more radiation tolerance than they build into commodity phone hardware. That’s the main thing preventing them from just using off-the-shelf consumer computer parts.

  21. Rad-hard stuff is mostly needed in NEO, or to work when passing through the Van Allen belts. The solar wind drops 1/r^2 off as you go further out.
    Also, it’s pretty easy to do rad-hard: just use old electronics. Semiconductors from the early 80’s, or (in VERY extreme cases) vacuum tubes.
    iphones may have plenty of pixels in their cameras, but I doubt that their spectral response is what you want (or calibrated well), not sensitive enough, and the optics isn’t up to snuff.
    Imager chips have gotten a lot cheaper, but lenses haven’t got Moore’s Law on their side.
    And really, if you’re going to spend ~$1B and a decade to get a probe to Pluto, you’re not going to skimp on the cameras. It’ll be a decade out of date (because of travel time) but at the high-end of what was possible when it was designed.

  22. Maybe we could strap the f*cking sh*thead thompson linked too on to the next probe with his I-phone and he can transmit his horsesh*t via right-wing radio to the pigf*ck ignorant American public and we can elect even more pigf*cking vermin to public office.
    He can hold his breath to and fro and then tell us about it at gunpoint when he gets back.
    JFK was not murdered because he was going to reveal the flat Earth, he was murdered because he was going to reveal that Marilyn Monroe was flat-chested, and pigf*cking Americans just would not be able to deal with it.

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