The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
New Horizons conducted the most distant radio occultation and radar experiments
“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.”
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft runs on 250 watts of plutonium power
“We use a radioactive element called plutonium to generate the heat, and that generates about 250 watts for us of power.”
A Jupiter gravity assist shortened New Horizons' Pluto transit by years
“We were looking for a gravity assist at Jupiter, which would have boosted the, which did boost the arrival time by about four or five years.”
New Horizons required nuclear licensing in six months instead of years
“The last time that that happened for the Cassini mission, the license itself took like three years, maybe five Pushing four. And we had to have it in under six months.”
NASA mandates a 15% to 25% FPGA gate margin for spaceflight
“NASA guidelines is you need at least, we would like you to have a 25% margin. Minimum number is 15%, which means 50% of a million gates, 150,000 gates just sitting there unused.”
New Horizons achieved a million-to-one signal-to-noise ratio at Pluto
“We've sent 20,000 watts on an aperture that's about 70 meters in diameter, so the instantaneous power in the beam is huge. It's over a million watts per square meter. At Pluto, which is 3.7 billion miles out, in a system that captures this, those wave forms ar…”