Step 1.) Send a command
Step 2.) Go to lunch
Step 3.) ???
Step 4.) Get back pretty pictures from mars
Didn’t forget debugging, diagnosing, and reprogramming Voyage which has left the solar system.
Yeah, that was seriously impressive. I worked flight ops for a while. I couldn’t imagine having to re-flash software from that far away.
I’m gonna need you to tell me step 0. I followed your instructions to the letter and all I got out of it was a very confused lunch.
smh NASA’s really gotta get an ethernet cable running to that thing
fun fact, that would make the transmission slower.
According to wikipedia cat5 cable has a propagation delay of 5.30 ns/m, which works out to about 62% of the speed of light. While radio waves propagate at the speed of light.
Yeah, the reason ethernet is generally faster compared with wifi is mainly due to interference from physical objects between the device and the transmitter. Not as much an issue when you’re issuing commands into the vacuum of space from large, high-powered antennas.
Radio waves always propagate at the speed of light, it’s just that the effective speed of light in copper and glass fibre is lower than that in air/vacuum.
This means that if you have long cables at some distance you’ll get a lower delay by using low earth orbit satellites like Starlink. Assuming a total distance via satellite of 1000km and the effective speed of light in glass fibre to be 2/3 c, cables over 667km will have a higher delay than the satellite.
Speed of light in fiberoptic cable is slower than c for a different reason. The light is in something close to vacuum, signals travel slower than c because the light doesn’t follow a straight path, it zig zags bouncing off the walls.
A radio wave or laser in reasonable vacuum (in orbit for example) will be lower latency than a signal on a fiber link the same length
I’m expecting lower ping via starlink than fiber once starlink has laser links between satellites
It’s not like they “play” competitive real time over there. It’s more turn based single player
Do they have to race 12 year olds high on sugar and Adderall?
I’d be a lot more impressed in people were shooting at NASA’s robots.
I’m obsessed with the idea of a slow-paced FPS game now. Imagine logging in once or twice a day, picking a shot and seeing if whoever it is is still there the next day.
Once I had a board game that was a lot like this. You controlled robots on a board, and had to plan out like 5 operations (turn/step/…) each round. Chaos ensues when you have 4 people hindering (or trying to) each other.
