Voyager antenna operator: 'I was the first human to see images from Neptune' When Richard Stephenson drives to work, there's a chance that later that day he'll become the first human to see new details of Mars, a moon of Saturn, or the far reaches of the solar system. Again. Stephenson's seen plenty of such firsts because his job as an Operations Supervisor at the Canberra Deep Space Tracking Complex …
Yes, Captain Dense, that was my point.
No more Space Roombas. People in the High Frontier. What's the point of just looking through a camera? Might as well play video games. Let's get working on people feeling the crunch of the granulated bleach of Mars's "soil" under thier boots and forgetting about arguing over whether to call Pluto a planet or not in favor of actually going for a look at it.
It's there. Yes it's hard to do. No, Bill Maher, self-proclaimed fiscal expert, doesn't have the last word on whether it is worthwhile or not any more than any other TV pundit does, and he is willfully misreading the impetus behind the push in order to fuel a "bit".
Besides, it isn't an either/or situation; we can have social programs on Earth *and* Space for Humans. We just have to decide we are going to get serious about national/international bookkeeping instead of pandering to corporations.
There are solid cultural reasons for going out there that are important no matter the politics of your particular culture at this point in time.
Too late for me. I'm from the generation that decided to do more with less (aka doing less).
I kinda suspect that our German friend Bode (who proposed the name "Uranus") was fully aware of its English pronunciation and associated alternative meaning, and intended it as a "take that" against Herschel for calling it "Georgium Sidus" while in brown-nose mode.
It's brilliant what the Voyager people have done. I was reading about retirement of someone in their 80s that worked on it since the start.
"That it remains humanity’s only close encounter with the planet is a testament to the durability of the Voyagers and the outstanding and astounding achievements the missions represent."
Also how little we spend on space exploration compared to weapons, or even pretty rubbish game/film/TV remakes/sequels.
I worked a JPL on the DSN in the 90s, around the time of the Voyager 2 encounter at Neptune.
Science data (the pics, among other things.) comes down, goes to the project first, then to the Image Processing Lab, both in Pasadena, and then onward from there. Operators running the ground systems didn't/don't even have access to the science data AFAIK.
No doubt the image processing was automated and the images could have emerged from the IPL within a few moments of download, but I'd wager plenty of people had a chance to see them first before being sent back out for general consumption.
And we all saw images coming in "In Real Time" on the TV monitors in the cafeteria and elsewhere around the Lab. And if you want to quibble about people possibly sleeping in some parts of the world when the data was coming in through Canberra, the same can be said for when it was coming in from Madrid and Barstow.
Thing is, NASA and JPL spacecraft don't downlink images that you can doubleclick and view. There's a whole toolchain needed to process the data into a format suitable for human viewing. As a simple forinstance, many of the imaging devices are "pushbroom" -- that is., a single line of pixels is scanned, followed by the next line, the next line and so on. This comes down in a variety of exotic formats. There's far, far more than you'd ever want to know over on http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com
See for instance this thread: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8198
(Far more with all the scripting and C wizardry you can shake a stick on UMSF. Well worth registering if you're interested but READ THE FAQ FIRST.
All the data's public domain; NASA / JPL make it avaiilable via the PDS if you'd like to have a go. You can still get images from Mars and have them in a postable state quicker than the actual project team if you're good, and lucky, and diligent :)
PDS: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/
Anyway, I'm not quite calling BS on this guy, but I'd be interested to hear what toolchains he uses / used in 1989.
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