New Horizons now 50AUs from the sun, shoots starfield containing Voyager 1 | Hacker News Reader

New Horizons now 50AUs from the sun, shoots starfield containing Voyager 1

pluto.jhuapl.edu

109 pointssohkamyung28 comments

> This summer, the mission team will transmit a software upgrade to boost New Horizons’ scientific capabilities

I find it absolutely insane that humanity can provide a software update to a chunk of metal flying ~36000mph where a SYN SYN-ACK takes 14 hours. I'm really curious about the error correction / protocol the sat uses.

Edit: I found some info on the specs of the sat, but not the protocol.

> Data rates depend on spacecraft distance, the power used to send the data and the size of the antenna on the ground. For most of the mission, New Horizons has used its high-gain antenna to exchange data with the Deep Space Network's largest antennas, 70 meters across. Even at Arrokoth, because New Horizons was be more than 4 billion miles from Earth and radio signals took more than six hours to reach the spacecraft, it was able to send information at about 1,000 bits per second.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/Systems-and-Compo...

You can find a detailed description of the RF system aboard the spacecraft here: https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/edmunds/Saturn/new_horizons_rf...

It's light on the details of any of the upper layers, but the vast majority of big-ticket government space missions use protocols developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS): https://public.ccsds.org/.

CCSDS publishes a wide range of open standards that run the gamut from very high bandwidth links for LEO observation satellites all the way to very low-rate, robust delay-tolerant links for deep space. For an overview of the standards at a very high level, I suggest taking a look at CCSDS 130.0-G-3, "Overview of Space Communications Protocols": https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/130x0g3.pdf

I'm really curious if/how New Horizons authenticates the singals and commands it recieves. Is it possible that because the only way to communicate with it is with the Deep Space Network they don't need to worry about a bad actor sending signals?

I think by far the most interesting part of this article is New Horizons observing parallax of Proxima Centauri... it's a bit mind-blowing to think about the vast distances involved, but to actually observe it is just wild to me.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20...

For anyone else who had a hard time parsing the title:

The New Horizon probe, which is now 50 times as far from the sun as Earth, photographed Voyager 1's location.

No, you can't see Voyager 1 in the photograph.

I wonder how many billionths of a pixel voyager takes up, if that’s even enough

From the photo's caption:

>Voyager 1 itself is about 1 trillion times too faint to be visible in this image

Although that is such a nice round number that I wonder how much work the "about" is doing in that sentence.

If I point my camera to the sky and photograph it I have a roughly 50% chance of photographing Voyager 1’s location, in that sense.

>No, you can't see Voyager 1 in the photograph.

I'm still holding out hope for next-gen long-range robotic space probe selfie tech.

JUICE: HAAAAAAAAAAAA

JUICE: YOUR CAMERA

JUICE: IS

JUICE: TRAAAAASH

(Sorry, go experience 17776 [0][1] if you haven't yet)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776

[1] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/chapter-1

Is that different from photographing Voyager 1's location from Earth?

One of the later links in the article points out that the starfield is visibly different than what we can see from earth (due to parallax), so yes, it would be.

The link in question is [1]. I was a little surprised at this, because 50 A.U. is less than 1/10 of 1% of a light year, so the view shouldn't have changed that much -- but sure enough, in a closeup view with a stereoviewer or blink comparator, one can see Proxima Centauri and (in a separate view) Wolf 359 change apparent positions a little.

Nonetheless one shouldn't be disappointed that most stars haven't visibly shifted.

[1] http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20...

How does the parallax due to being in a different point within the Solar System compare to the parallax due to the Solar System itself moving relative to the Galaxy?

Is this the magnitude of parallax effect we could observe within a couple years while sitting here on Earth?

[0] mentions “a typical Sun-relative 20–200 kilometers per second”, which would translate to 1.2-12 years for a 50 AU displacement, but only for stars that move 90° perpendicular to the sun; and for stars that are further away than Proxima Centauri or Wolf 359 you have to multiply with a corresponding factor. So I think it’s typically more in the range of centuries.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_br...

Since New Horizon is the fastest probe ever sent from earth, I wondered how long it would take to go further from the sun than Voyager 1.

Never, it turns out: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3520/when-will-new...

Fun fact, Voyager 1 - at 17km/s, isn't always moving away from Earth.

Earth does 30km/s around the Sun, so at some points in it's orbit, Earth is catching up to Voyager 1.

Pretty cool fact, thanks!

I have question, how can you quantify space exploration achievements by nation, and what result would be at this moment in history of mankind?

You could count things like

* number of launches using own-nation capability

* number of people launched

* number of moons/planets/asteroids/comets orbited

* number of moons/planets/asteroids/comets landed on

For some answers, you might want to check

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight#Spacefaring_civili...

and

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_spaceflight#Milestones

and others

Article nitpick: Pluto ain't a planet.

Yes, because a dwarf person ain't a person, right?

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

I wonder how many of the more cautious HN readers will actually be able to view this article, given it is entirely a blob of JS with no clear text to view without javascript, served over an insecure connection. Basically to view it you have to whitelist arbitrary javascript from a server where any arbitrary JS can be injected in transit. Don't load it on public networks... Given I didn't do either of those things, I'd really appreciate a rehost in static HTML somewhere if someone else did.

This page loads just fine for me when I disabled JS. The text content is in the original request for text/html from http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20...

Hm. I still get "Please enable JavaScript to view the page content. Your support ID is: ..." Oh well.

Probably Akamai injecting something into the page for DDoS protection.

Here's a direct link to the money shot: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Galleries/Featured-Images/pics/voyag...

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