Ivan Linscott
Senior Research Engineer, Stanford University. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
scientistacademicengineer
Ivan Linscott is a radio astronomer and senior research engineer affiliated with Stanford University. He worked on the Radio Science Experiment (REX) for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.
1shows
1appearances
16statements
13resolved
7supported
2contradicted
54%fully supported
Everything Ivan Linscott said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
The Stanford Dish can detect one-microwatt radio signals 1,000 kilometers away
“The dish has a sufficient aperture and sensitivity to see a millionth of a watt at a thousand kilometers.”
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…”
Key ultra-stable oscillator suppliers went bankrupt before the New Horizons mission
“There was a French company that was making them, and they had gone bankrupt. There was a US company that was making them. They'd gone bankrupt.”
Only two of five delivered oscillators met New Horizons specifications
“And so here we are, six months before launch, we have to actually have one of these things to integrate into the payload, and that company delivered five. We tested the five. Two were okay. Two met specs, and they were put on the mission.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ivan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Senior Research Engineer, Stanford University | 1 | 16 | 54% 7/13 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |