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I told my best friend that the New Horizons probe more than likely snapped thousands of photos as it whizzed by Pluto, and he says that it took MAYBE a dozen or so. I told him that NASA was NOT going to spend over 700 MILLION DOLLARS on a probe that would only take a FEW pictures.
Have any of you read or heard just how MANY photos the probe DID take?
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Posted: |
Jul 19, 2015 - 5:33 AM
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By: |
Grecchus
(Member)
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New Horizons uses 32-bit processors. From an article I've previously read, it has the power of 4 Nintendo Playstation machines.
If there are 2x 8GB memories, of which only 1x is used to store picture information, then I assume the 32-bit processor has to use hardware paging, as 32 bits can only access 4GB at a time. If we assume picture resolutions of 1280x1024 with, say, two bytes for pixel channels then each 4GB chunk could store 1638.4 pictures. That would be about 3276.8 decently resolvable pictures that are not compressed. That's an estimate, although I think New Horizons is not likely to be capable of storing much more than that.
If the picture memory is full and another Kuiper Belt object is encountered, the on-board software will have to wipe the memory as desired to make more room for newer pictures/data. The probe must have used a fair bit of propellant in the Pluto flyby. Far more worrying is how much fuel is there left to be able to pitch, yaw and roll the probe to make the most of any further encounters. When the fuel is gone, either NH will tumble or the last squirts of hydrazine could be used to spin it up so that it points in some favorable direction. At that point, it becomes an artefact from planet earth.
Edit: according to Wikipedia, 36MP is a resolution of 7360x4912 as standard.
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Posted: |
Jul 20, 2015 - 8:06 AM
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By: |
Solium
(Member)
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More info:
New Horizons will operate in three separate "departure phases" that last until January 2016, when the mission's Pluto encounter officially ends. But data delivery to Earth will continue far beyond that date, because downlink rates are so slow — about 2 kilobits per second — and the probe has gathered so much information about the dwarf planet system. (New Horizons must also share the use of NASA's Deep Space Network of data-receiving antennas with other missions.)
New Horizons collected about 50 gigabits of data during its nine-day-long "close-approach" phase of operations, which ended Thursday (July 16). As of Friday, less than 2 percent of that information had come down to the ground, Stern said.
New Horizons is initially sending home compressed versions of its data files, to get them back to Earth relatively quickly. A concerted effort to get all the flyby data down in compressed form will begin in September and should take 10 to 12 weeks, Stern said.
The complete dataset of uncompressed files, meanwhile, should be on the ground by late 2016, NASA officials have said.
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