Waiting...
Jan. 1st, 2019 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quoththeravynNew Years' Day...
It's a day of waiting for a signal to cross the solar system. At lightspeed from Ultima Thule (slightly beyond, actually), incoming to the earth at 6 hours and a bit travel time.
And... it's there! The New Horizons space probe survived the encounter (there's a chance it could have hit a rock or a grain of dust or something)! And the data pointers are right where they were expected to be, so there's probably a full load of data, including pictures with 40-ish meter per pixel resolution.
The little spacecraft that could, did. Again. It'll be downlinking the data for the next two years or so. It's a 25 watt transmitter; it's kind of amazing we can get the signal at all at this distance.
It's always fun listening in to the control room of somebody else's spacecraft, trying to figure out the acronyms as the Mission Operations Manager polls each subsystem for status.
Also up today, between events Out There, is making chicken broth out of the bones and carcass of last weekend's dinner, thawing out a slice of Christmas stollen. Oh, and, if I can spare some attention, re-reading, yet again, my latest attempt at a novel, right through, so as to arrive at answers to questions like, Would anybody else ever want to read something like this? How exactly can I introduce more conflict that's not just between the ears of the narrator? And how to communicate the setting and the characters' reactions and feelings (as viewed from inside the head of the narrator, who's maybe not the most sensitive person ever).
It's a day of waiting for a signal to cross the solar system. At lightspeed from Ultima Thule (slightly beyond, actually), incoming to the earth at 6 hours and a bit travel time.
And... it's there! The New Horizons space probe survived the encounter (there's a chance it could have hit a rock or a grain of dust or something)! And the data pointers are right where they were expected to be, so there's probably a full load of data, including pictures with 40-ish meter per pixel resolution.
The little spacecraft that could, did. Again. It'll be downlinking the data for the next two years or so. It's a 25 watt transmitter; it's kind of amazing we can get the signal at all at this distance.
It's always fun listening in to the control room of somebody else's spacecraft, trying to figure out the acronyms as the Mission Operations Manager polls each subsystem for status.
Also up today, between events Out There, is making chicken broth out of the bones and carcass of last weekend's dinner, thawing out a slice of Christmas stollen. Oh, and, if I can spare some attention, re-reading, yet again, my latest attempt at a novel, right through, so as to arrive at answers to questions like, Would anybody else ever want to read something like this? How exactly can I introduce more conflict that's not just between the ears of the narrator? And how to communicate the setting and the characters' reactions and feelings (as viewed from inside the head of the narrator, who's maybe not the most sensitive person ever).