New Horizons

The New Horizon mission is the stuff of science fiction. It is truly a remarkable achievement that I have been monitoring since it blasted off in 2006. Effectively a collection of old space junk with an ambitious mission goals.

New Horizon's 175kgs of human engineering is now well over 7 billion kilometers away from Earth. Think about that for a second. It is 32 times the distance from the Earth to the sun away.

But it is the technology that amazes me. Given the distance and the time, the fact that it is still sending a data back is amazing. And particularly given how primitive some of the onboard technology actually is.

Here are some stats:

The CPU that powers New Horizon's is the same as the one that powered the original Playstation. A Playstation! The current Galaxy S6 has 350 times the processing power. Think about that. The Nintendo Entertainment System (1986) had twice the power of the Apollo Guidance Computer (1966). Yet the Galaxy S6 (2015) is 350 times that of the onboard computer of New Horizon (2006).

The data returns to earth at 600-1200 bits per second which is a fraction of modern bandwidth. That is similar speed to a 1200 baud modem (circa early 1980s). But here is the thing, it is achieving that bandwidth over billions of kilometers. Just remarkable! But to put that into perspective, our humble Galaxy S6 would achieve about 6 billion times that speed at the maximum throughput of the Telstra 4GX network. As one person involved in the project pointed out:

“At the data rate we have … it takes over 2 hours to downlink a standard picture from your cell phone! That means we will spend the next 16 months transmitting all the data down to Earth,” Curt Niebur, a NASA program scientist, wrote during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread.

For those of you who remember downloading images in the early 1980s, this should bring back some traumatic memories of images that appeared line by line (leave your jokes and anecdotes in the comments!).

Power wise, the whole system was unsuitable for solar panels - I mean it's Pluto after all. Instead it is powered by a single plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generator able to produce 200 watts. This is more than enough for the three optical instruments, two plasma instruments, a dust sensor and the radio science receiver which all account for a tiny 28 watts. But that's nothing compared to most modern smartphones which sip only a watt or two.

Lastly, LORRI (the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) system that has been used in the early stages of the journey is very humble 1 megapixel camera. 1 megapixel! The two year old Nokia Lumia 1020 was 41 Megapixels, and most smartphones are 10 or more.

Ultimately New Horizon's has taught us several things about our galaxy. However, for me it is also a lesson on technology. The technology in New Horizons has been superseded by many generations in the short time it has taken to get from Earth to Pluto. A sub $100 smartphone would be significantly faster and have more sensors and better camera than New Horizon's.

And although none of this should be surprising, it begs some questions about those of us working with technology in education:

• What kind of technology advances will occur while we are busy on our own journeys? 

• What kind of world will 10 years from now look like?

• If technology is accelerating, how do we accommodate that in our education environments? 

For now, I am just going to enjoy the images that arrive ... every couple of hours.