HN Explorer

32 comments

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somedude895
Would be cool to see how often they communicate, and what data is exchanged. Also, what bandwidth and the time it takes to arrive back here.
cygx
Also [...] the time it takes to arrive back here

For reference:

    Voyager 1, interstellar space    21 lighthours
    Perseverance, Mars surface       12 lightminutes
    Artemis, lunar orbit            1.2 lightseconds
spzb
Aren't those measures of distance?
gberger
Yes, but the data travels at approximately the speed of light, so you can just drop the "light" unit in front of the time units
spzb
But where’s the fun of pedantry in that?
argvargc
Delete "light" and it's the answer.
emayljames
Yeah, it takes me 2 trainhours to get to work.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cygx
Sure, but conversion to travel time is trivial given a signal velocity of c. Or just assume a 'natural' system of units where c=1 :p
gspr
Maybe some of what you desire can be found here? https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
shagie
And occasionally... you get a glimpse of something neat... like dish 43 getting data from VGR2. https://i.imgur.com/ZVAnt03.png

The downlink is 160 b/s at -154.54 dBm (as I type this - might have been different in the screen shot)... and then compare that to other data feeds on other dishes.

walrus01
I was not aware the 2001 mars orbiter was still operating!
moontear
This is really nice, but I want more data.

Everything of course only if publically available:

- Where are the probes located right now (map)?

- what is their trajectory/target location?

- what does the data look like being transmitted (I.e. Voyager isn’t more than a blip, or is it)?

- what Kind of data could be still gathered, e.g. could we ask the Probe to „take a picture“ or would the bandwidth simply not be enough?

gspr
> (I.e. Voyager isn’t more than a blip, or is it)?

According to [1], as we speak the DSS 14 antenna at Goldstone is receiving Voyager 1 data at a whooping 160 bits/sec.

[1] https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

cgb223
How quickly is the bit rate degrading from Voyager?

Like if it’s 160 bits per second now, how long until it’s 100 bits per second? 10? 1?

gspr
Interesting question!

At any rate, I believe death is imminent anyway: in a few years, the RTGs will have degraded so far that no single instrument can be powered :-(

procd
No wonder why Maven is so freaking slow
techas
Very nice site!

Although, many links to data are broken, that is very frustrating...

jeffgreco
This is a lot more crowded since the last time I checked! You know I’ve been reading too much Kim Stanley Robinson when I immediately start worrying about contaminating these various celestial bodies’ surfaces...
darkwater
Does anybody know why the bot[1] publishing Pluto photos from New Horizons has been suspended?

[1] https://twitter.com/bitsofpluto

shagie
Not an answer, but a pointer...

https://github.com/hugovk/bitsofpluto is the GitHub repo for the code

https://twitter.com/hugovk would be the person on twitter to ask.

darkwater
Thanks (and sorry) for doing my homeworks
shagie
No problem. Most times the bots are lost in the "who runs that?" and its pointless to look. This one happened to have been not difficult to track down. I'm curious of the answer if you get one. ... and I see that someone dug up the answer further down.
mitchdoogle
These kinds of domains always rubbed me the wrong way. Not only does it abuse the intent of the TLD, but the dot breaks up the word in an odd place. I just imagine trying to tell someone this domain in person and it feels very awkward. Why not just go with spaceprobedata.com or spaceprobes.org, or one of the other thousands of TLDs they have now?

It seems like this is a symptom of people wanting the shortest possible domain name, similar to people refusing to use a new TLD and instead spending thousands on a .com. It's all strange to me, but maybe I'm just a rule follower who doesn't care about vanity that much.

lioeters
I thought I'd seen a phrase that describes these kinds of domains. Found it:

> A domain hack is a domain name that suggests a word, phrase, or name when concatenating two or more adjacent levels of that domain.

> For example, "bir.ds" and "examp.le", using the fictitious country-code domains .ds and .le, suggest the words birds and example respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack

[dead] golemiprague
@bitsofpluto, the bot that suppose to show pictures from New Horizon on twitter is suspended for breaking Twitter rules, I wonder why?
iJohnDoe
Very cool site! Awesome design. Awesome domain. Great job on the project.