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NASA beams home cat video from 19 million miles away
(bigthink.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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They keep reiterating "faster, faster". But the discussion is "laser" vs. "radio".
Surprise: both travel at the speed of light. Both are the same speed.
Hmmm.
Are they afraid of having to explain "bandwidth"?
When talking communication, most people think of the speed with which a unit quantity of information is transmitted, not the latency of that transmission.
Referring to bandwidth as the speed of a communication system is pretty normal, even for people who know how to use the term bandwidth.
And when that latency goes up from a few millis (from google to you) to, let's say, 10 minutes (from mars to earth), then they would start to notice it :)
Oh, certainly. But common language has a term for high latency already, it's just not speed related. Everyone knows about a laggy connection on a phone or video call.
Fun fact: TCP has some implicit design considerations around the maximum cost of packet retransmission on a viable link that only works on roughly local planetary scale.
When NASA started to get out to Mars with the space Internet, they needed to tweak tcp to fit retransmission being proportionally much more expensive and let connections live longer before being "broken".
True, but with the speed of light being constant as far as we know worrying about it is sort of a moot point
On the ground, we are also talking about fast internet, not about internet with "really wide bandwidth"
Laser clearly has better bandwidth then radio in most cases right?
Higher frequencies = smaller wavelengths = ability to pack more information into the same wave.
That's why phones started using the very high upper microwave bands for 5G.
Right.
It is how "fast" they can transfer x amount of information. Not how fast the material being used to encode information can move through space.
That's like saying that a Camaro isn't any faster than a PT Cruiser because the law says 65mph.