New Horizons conducted the most distant radio occultation and radar experiments
Ivan Linscott · a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto! · Jan 2, 2019 · at 6:10
Ivan Linscott, Stanford astronomer and member of NASA's New Horizons radio science team, outlines the record-setting achievements of the mission's REX instrument.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“This is the furthest radius occultation experiment that's ever been done, and the furthest bi-static radar, furthest radar experiment that's been done.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ivan Linscott
A radioactive leak halted DOE plutonium fuel production for New Horizons
“In our case, that process got started. There's a plutonium processing facility that the U.S. Department of Energy maintains, and that there was in about halfway through the process, there was a leak that was discovered in the radioactive leak, and they shut do…”
The U.S. bought half of New Horizons' plutonium fuel from Russia
“Glenn, brokering through the U.S. State Department, Got the U.S. To make an offer to the Russians to buy their plutonium for this mission... For the missing piece of it. It wasn't the entire piece, but it was about half.”
Pluto's night side is significantly warmer than its day side
“Discovered some really quite surprising things, like the day, the night side is a whole lot warmer than the day side”
New Horizons flew to Pluto with only five unused FPGA gates
“He had five. Five gates left. And that's the way we flew.”
A JPEG compression delay caused New Horizons' pre-flyby safe mode
“It turned out that six months ago, the picture of the sky was dark. There was nothing but black and a few stars, so the JPEG compression took a whole lot less time. It was done when the flash commands came in. This time, it wasn't.”
The Stanford Dish used surplus WWII battleship anti-aircraft hydraulic motors
“And the hydraulic motors that were the best, that were best designed for that were the anti-aircraft gun controls on U.S. Battleships. And after World War II, those were being surplused. And so what they did was they got two of them. Well, maybe they got a few…”