Plooto's original B2B payment product was built on Bitcoin and failed
“So the first iteration of Pluto was to do payments, business payments on blockchain and Bitcoin was like the only coin at that time on the only cryptocurrency at that time. So, so we built it on, on Bitcoin and then other things came and we started a multi I g…”
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 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.”
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 flew to Pluto with only five unused FPGA gates
“He had five. Five gates left. And that's the way we flew.”
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…”
Radio signals between Earth and New Horizons took nine hours round-trip
“Because it's a four and a half hour light travel time. So essentially round trip is nine hours.”
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.”