American TV presenter has criticized NASA for the “slow” – Popular Mechanics

On July 14, New Horizons to Pluto approached to a distance of about 16 thousand kilometers, and made a series of photographs of the planet in high definition. The world’s media have published these photos in September 2015. The unit will then flew closer – and last week we have received the most detailed picture to date surface Plutona.Odnako Greta Van Suster leave no suspicions that NASA is working quickly enough

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  Tweet Greta Van Suster

  « Why they waited so long to post these pictures? the pictures were taken in 2015, but because the salary they get from our tax payments ».

In order to answer the question of presenter, you need to have some idea of ​​what New Horizons, it transmits data to Earth and how far shares and Houston station

interplanetary probe New Horizons is powered by a source of power from 2 to 10 watts -. something like a night light in the nursery. The information collected is stored on a device similar to a memory card camcorder. The compressed information is sent in the direction of Earth.
Information is sent to Earth by means of a large (2.1 m diameter) antenna, but the signal came to us, it should be very precise direction. As a backup for situations where precise focusing is not possible, use a spare antenna. Both work in the frequency range of centimeter wavelengths, which is used in satellites, mobile and wireless networks.

In order to overcome the distance between Earth and Pluto, the wave takes about 4.5 hours. But this does not mean that 4.5 hours from the station NASA get all she can tell.

High-terrestrial receivers (NASA’s Deep Space Network) is obtained from New Hoprizons signal at a rate of about 2000 bits per second . The point distance: Jupiter vicinity of information he entered in 2007 at a rate 38 kbps. This is slightly slower than the usual home modem. The distance to Pluto – from 4.4 to 7.4 billion kilometers – five to seven times greater than the distance to Jupiter, and it is not surprising that the information comes out somewhat slower than on our home networks

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