Five fun facts about New Horizons Computer – lanacion.com (Argentina)

An artistic rendering of the New Horizons mission to Pluto came after a travesiía nine year. Photo: courtesy Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Even though I had not been introduced Apple’s iPhone, and Sony had not yet released the powerful and still current game console PlayStation 3, New Horizons began its long journey to Pluto. Among many of its landmarks, it reached a speed of 50,000 mph and became the fastest spacecraft man-made. With an estimated cost of $ 700 million, it took a while to get to it was considered the ninth planet in the solar system.

For this speed, the ship ran (and continue to meet) a series of preprogrammed instructions almost a decade ago. And New Horizons had just hours to record all information possible to its closest pass by Pluto technology that, at first glance, may seem antiquated and obsolete by today’s standards in contemporary electronic devices.

With the electronic brain of the PlayStation

Set the instructions of a spacecraft that will travel for almost a decade requires a reliable hardware, with no margin for error. To do this, NASA choose proven models, and in this case opted for the Mongoose V processor chip 32-bit MIPS R3000 12 MHz. For reference, was the model chosen by Sony for the first version of the PlayStation console launched in 1994.

Communications

The transmission of the New Horizons uses a main antenna of 2.1 meters in diameter for communications with others support. It has a transmission capacity of 1 kilobyte per second, and the radio transmission takes to reach Earth in about four hours and 25 minutes. After its passage by Pluto, the time increases two minutes for each completed year.

Storage

The spacecraft has two state storage drives 8GB solid, one backup. Once registered the scan data of Pluto, this information will take about 16 months to reach Earth.

House

Long Range Reconnaissance Imager ( LORI) is the eagle eye of New Horizons. Its digital camera with no moving parts protected with a structure of almost 9 kilos of weight, record monochromatic images of high resolution of 1024 by 1024 pixels during the approach and exploration of Pluto, estimated at 180 days. It is one of the most energy-intensive instruments, about 5.8 watts.

Pluto in pictures, from 1930 to date

Energy

The seven instruments on the probe consume between 2 and 10 watts each. At this point, New Horizons was designed to have an efficient consumption of less than 28 watts. Power is provided by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, based on 11 kilos of plutonium dioxide that will give a range of use until 2030. .