Astounding technical achievement - close up pan of Pluto's Icy Mountains [View all]

[Pluvious]

Aakash Gupta:

The math on this image is insane.

New Horizons transmitted at 2,000 bits per second from 3 billion miles away. Slower than a 1990s dial-up modem. It took 16 months to download all the flyby data.

The spacecraft had to hit a target box 100km wide, arriving within 150 seconds of schedule, after 9 years of flight. Miss it and the preloaded observation commands point at empty space.

Ten days before arrival, the spacecraft crashed and went into safe mode. Engineers had 72 hours to restore everything.

The probe is now 5 billion miles out, still whispering data back to Earth. We got 50 gigabits of Pluto photos using technology slower than your phone’s bluetooth.

Link to tweet

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"Today's science fiction becomes tomorrow's science fact"
-Isaac Asimov

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Edit to add a great comment:

It took nine years and billions of kilometers for humanity to witness a world that had never been seen before. What New Horizons revealed was not just a distant ice ball, but a living geological archive
mountains sculpted from frozen nitrogen, plains shaped by ancient forces, and a landscape that defies our assumptions about where complexity can exist.

Pluto reminds us that even at the edge of the solar system, nature is not silent or static. It evolves, it moves, it remembers. In the coldest darkness, creation still unfolds slowly, patiently, beyond our imagination. What we once called a distant dot is now a world with depth, history, and quiet majesty.