Why Pluto's Portraits Require Patience

After nine and a half years and three billion miles, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zipped past Pluto and its five moons on Tuesday morning. NASA shared the last photo sent back to Earth before the flyby Tuesday, shown here. New Horizons will send back at least one higher-resolution image on Wednesday, but the rest of the photos will remain stuck on the spacecraft for months.

Why? Because sending them back takes lots and lots of time.

Imagine someone speaking to you softly from the other side of a large room. You might be able to barely hear him but to make out the words if he spoke very, very slowly.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is at the edge of the solar system, nearly three billion miles away. Its radio transmitter puts out a tiny 12 watts of power, about the same as an LED bulb in a table lamp.

Even with a huge 70-meter radio dish on Earth listening to the faint transmissions, that means New Horizons has to talk very, very slowly.

As New Horizons starts sending its trove of flyby data back on Wednesday, the pace will be at a glacial 1,000 bits a second. That is roughly the rate at which computer modems talked to each other in the mid-1980s.

Photographs taken by the spacecraft's black-and-white camera measure 1,024 pixels by 1,024 pixels, or more than a million pixels in total. Each pixel consists of 12 bits, to record one out of 4,096 possible gray levels. That's more than 12 million bits of information in each picture.

To send that all back at 1,000 bits a second would take 12,000 seconds, or 3 hours and 20 minutes. Images can be compressed, but even if squeezed to a tenth of the original size, one photograph would still take 20 minutes to download.

New Horizons is taking a lot of pictures and collecting a slew of other measurements, too — so much that it would take three months to send all of it back if New Horizons could get exclusive use of NASA's Deep Space Network, the system of radio telescopes that communicates with distant space probes.

But the network is also needed to talk to NASA's many other space probes, so 16 months will pass before scientists can get their hands on all of the data from this week's flyby.

This week, the New Horizons team will retrieve a few choice images and snippets of what they think will be the science highlights.
—KENNETH CHANG

courtesy 0f #TheNewYorkTimes

"They were on their honeymoon".

038 | 1905 | St. Augustine , #Florida . "They were on their honeymoon".

 A Higher Definition photo since 1905 which shows a couple celebrating their honeymoon at the beach of St. Augustine , Florida.

10 reasons to avoid instant noodles...

10 reasons to avoid instant noodles...

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1. Nutrient Absorption : Noodles
inhibit the absorption of nutrients for
the children under 5.

2. Cancer Causing : The ingredient in
the instant noodles called "Styrofoam',
Which is a cancer causing agent.

3. Miscarriage : Women who are
Eating instant noodles during their
pregnancy causes miscarriage, because
it affect the development of a fetus.

4. Junk Food : instant noodles are
enriched with full of carbohydrates,but
no vitamins, fiber and minerals. This
makes the instant noodles considered as
a junk food.

5. Sodium : Instant noodles are power
packed with high amounts of sodium.
Excess consumption of sodium leads to
heart disease, stroke, hypertension and
kidney damage.

6. MSG : Mono-sodium Glutamate is
used to enhance the flavor of instant
noodles. People who are allergic to MSG
consume it as part of their diet, then
they end up suffering from headaches,
facial flushing, pain, burning sensations.

7. Overweight : Eating Noodles is the
leading cause of obesity. Noodles
contains fat and large amounts of
sodium, which causes water retention in
the body and surely it leads to
overweight.

8. Digestion : Instant noodles are bad
for digestive system. Regular
consumption of instant noodles causes
irregular bowl movements and bloating.

9. Polypropylene Glycol : The ingredient in
the instant noodles called "Propylene
Glycol" which has a anti-freeze
property. This ingredient is used
because it prevents the noodles from
drying by retaining moisture. It weakens
the immune system of our body. It is
easily absorbed by the body and it
accumulates in the kidneys, heart and
liver. It causes abnormalities and
damage to those areas.

10. Metabolism : Regular consumption
of instant noodles affect the body's
metabolism, because of the chemical
substances like additives, coloring and
preservatives inside the noodles.

Big Cat-Hercules

The name of this cat is Hercules, a feline Liger, which is cross between a Lion with a Tiger. Ligers usually measure 3.5 to 4 meters long and three year old cubs can weigh up to half a ton.
Hercules holds the Guinness World Record weighing at 900 pounds, he is the largest cat in the world and is 6 feet tall when standing. Although very huge in size, Hercules could run at an astonishing speed of 80 km / hour and can eat 100 pounds of food in one meal