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New Horizons


r4pt0r

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The most dramatically apropriate outcome would be for the probe to malfunction right now.

All these questions, and no mission scheduled for another 20 something years. At least.

Part of me wants to jinx the probe now.

And think of the amount of bs that will be spewed out by idiots who will claim there are 'faces', alien pyramids, death stars, visitors, and if we're lucky maybe even a mass suicide cult. The potential is enormous!

It's not often that i think science should shove off in the name of entertainment, but the more i think about it, the more my IQ seems to drop.

Die New Horizons?

Well I guess this guy jinxed it.

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Guys, I've got a rope !

** joins in **

I try to stay optimistic, if Philae woke up, New Horizon can surely recover (finger crossed).

Philae woke up months later. New Horizons has 10 days. This could be the Sci-Fi thriller of the year...

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Guys, let's not forget that right now NH is alive and well. It's still in contact with Earth, and we have a week and a half to fix whatever went wrong. We might lose a bit of scientific data during this troubleshooting phase, but I'm (cautiously) optimistic that the probe will be back to normal in time for the flyby.

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I don't want to jinx it too, but New Horizons is in great shape. Operations to restore full spacecraft functionality after a safe mode event has been triggered usually last one or two days (the other time it happened to New Horizons, in 2007, it took 2 days). Due to the round-trip up- and down-link time, we shouldn't be surprised if we had to add another day or two. We're going to lose some science, but hey, none of us here is a planetary scientist, even a couple of images would be enough for us to consider the mission a full success :D

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The most dramatically apropriate outcome would be for the probe to malfunction right now.

Well I guess this guy jinxed it.

How is it possible to quote someone and still misquote them at the same time? ^^

I clearly wasn't serious anyway, but i also said right now and "right now" is timestamped at 29th June 2015, 08:35

I am only guilty of providing NASA with a plausible excuse, because what could be more plausible than "Well, we were clearly jinxed by some arse on the internet."

Lol, anyway i do want to see close-ups of Pluto in my lifetime much like the rest of us. [edit] That said, i'll take the bashing if it helps. The cruel gods of space anomalies might be amused if i were tossed into a volcano or something. Heck even i would be amused.

Edited by georgTF
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Or to put it another way, a byte is 8 bits, and a(n ASCII) character is 2 bytes. So, to send what I've typed here the probe would have taken over 5 minutes.

Uh, actually the standard ASCII set is 127 symbols, so only 7 bits, but almost always encoded in 8 bits these days and extended because most computers use bytes as a fundamental unit of storage. I'd expect a space probe to (a) use the most efficient encoding for what it's trying to send, and (B) compress the data before sending (, and © use LOTS of error detection/correction algorithms).

Further on character representations, Windows APIs and Java uses UTF16 encoding (2 bytes), which unfortunately is not enough to encode all of Unicode.

UTF8 has become one of the most popular storage/transmission formats for text since it is endian-agnostic and can encode all of Unicode. It's a bit tricky however since it's a variable encoding scheme - depending on the symbol, it can take anywhere from 1 to 4 bytes so text handling is not as easy as with a fixed-size encoding scheme. Modern Unix APIs tend to use UTF8.

There are many other encoding schemes..

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Uh, actually the standard ASCII set is 127 symbols, so only 7 bits, but almost always encoded in 8 bits these days and extended because most computers use bytes as a fundamental unit of storage. I'd expect a space probe to (a) use the most efficient encoding for what it's trying to send, and (B) compress the data before sending (, and © use LOTS of error detection/correction algorithms).

I was just showing how slow the transmission is, not suggesting anything about the craft or its compression algrorithms. :D

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