New Horizons at Pluto

davefoc said:
This is sort of interesting. I took a look at the site I linked to above which shows what satellites the Deep Space Network antennae are communicating with and right not it shows two antennae at Goldstone and two antennae in Australia sending data to the New Horizons space craft. There are many possibilities of what is going on, perhaps at the top of the list should be that I don't understand what I'm looking at and there is a mistake in the information displayed.

Perhaps there is more than one receiver on the New Horizons spacecraft? Rhere is a lot of redundancy. I looked around a bit and according to one source it sounds like the receiver can distinguish between left and right circular polarization signals and there are two receivers for redundancy. So does that explain why there might be four signals at once being sent to the new Horizons spacecraft. I'm not sure.

I'm surprised that transmitting from the much smaller antennae is worthwhile given how much larger the gain of the larger antennae is. If they can send data to the spacecraft with the much smaller antennae it suggests that they will be able to communicate with the spacecraft much farther away than it is now. And I suppose that's true because they can communicate with voyager and it is several times farther away than New Horizons is right now.
Click to expand...

You need at least two places on earth to receive and send signals because some of the time the spacecraft is below the horizon in the same way that the sun is sometimes below the horizon.

Edit. Receive and send signals.
 
Last edited:
rjh01 said:
You need at least two places on earth to receive signals because some of the time the spacecraft is below the horizon in the same way that the sun is sometimes below the horizon.
Click to expand...

The Deep Space Network has three locations about 120 degrees apart in longitude to solve this problem.

What I observed was two antennae in Goldstone and two antennae in Australia transmitting to the New Horizons craft at the same time. I wondered why this would be so. I can imagine quite a few possible reasons for this but I don't know enough to eliminate any of them or even to know if one of the reasons I considered is the actual reason why they might be sending data to the New Horizons craft from multiple sources simultaneously.
 
Again via boingboing (via laughingsquid, via imgur):
7C2GfIF.gif
 
I'm wondering if Pluto's inclination might account for at least some of its scarcity of craters.
 
Just wild speculation, but could the system have originally been one body, which was hit by something? That's how our moon was likely formed. If that happened, say, 100 ma, it would account for the youthful surface. The re-solidification could also account for some of the weird features, like the hummocky features on the right-hand side of the high-res Pluto image and the hills (water volcanoes?).

Someone with some tracing paper, a sharp pencil, and some spare time could do some seriously cool science with this, looking for stress ellipses.
 
Dinwar said:
Just wild speculation, but could the system have originally been one body, which was hit by something? That's how our moon was likely formed. If that happened, say, 100 ma, it would account for the youthful surface. The re-solidification could also account for some of the weird features, like the hummocky features on the right-hand side of the high-res Pluto image and the hills (water volcanoes?).

Someone with some tracing paper, a sharp pencil, and some spare time could do some seriously cool science with this, looking for stress ellipses.
Click to expand...
They just said on the Nova special Chasing Pluto that Pluto may have collided with another Pluto-sized object. Pluto survived, and the other object broke up and formed the moons.

That special was fascinating. Amazingly, they even managed to get images from today into the end of the program.
 
CelticRose said:
They just said on the Nova special Chasing Pluto that Pluto may have collided with another Pluto-sized object. Pluto survived, and the other object broke up and formed the moons.
Click to expand...
I'd like to see a model/animation that shows moons, the likes of Charon, emanating from a collision. Anybody?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom