I think it's amazing that in a matter of months we'll be seeing the best ever photos of Pluto take by the New Horizon craft/ship whatever. About 7.5 billion kilometres away and it transmits photos back at about 56k/s. How does it even do that? How can we still have communication to an object that far away and how does its batteries last as long as nearly 10 years?

Personally, I'd send a million of them up with slightly different course and with a massive pixel camera on each so that they could create a half ring around Pluto and record a bullet time half orbit of it. Actually, I'd do that to Saturn first as that's a bloody cool looking planet (according to the movie Interstellar) but would take a few more cameras.

Pluto comes into focus - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Yeah the comms and distance thing is pretty amazing. Especially when the tech is 10 years old.

In order:

• Encounter is in less than a week on the 14th July. It will take a while to send back all the data it gathers, but I'd expect to see some pics much sooner than that, like within a week.
• It does it with a transmitter, error correction codes, and the deep space network - and I think the data rate might be lower than that.
• It's powered by a nuclear power source (RTG). The reason it works at all is because of that, and the reason Philae has been dormant for so long is after the Challenger explosion people got twitchy about such launches.
• You don't need a million spacecraft, you just need ones that have long lifespans and different ways of getting to the planets (eg solar sails, ion propulsion, VASIMR). However nobody is putting big money into space, they are more concentrated on giving it to bankers.

This is the last time you are likely to be part of seeing a planet close up, for the first time.

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The million spacecraft was just for the bullet time movie ala Matrix which would be a massive waste of money but pretty cool result if it could be pulled off.

Next big thing, Fibre to the Planet.

Strangely, I didn't see this coming.

Only really need 3-4 cameras to pull out bullet time type effects today.

You know there is an Interplanetary Internet, don't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

It was my immediate, possibly childish, thought as soon as I saw the title.

Of course I know about it, I'm always skyping my cousins on the other planets.

To bullet time the orbit of a planet whilst capturing the cloud stillness, it would take more than 3 or 4 cameras I would think. No point in stitching pictures from different times when you can send up millions of go pros.

Glad Horizon isn't going to Uranus.

I quickly looked for the thumbs up button. Ha!

The ingenuity of western civilisation is awesome

It uses plutonium for power and deep space radio comms is pretty straightforward

Pity it can't launch a probe to impact pluto

3D feature extraction, object reconstruction, and texturing. All you need is enough simultaneous images to get good coverage. Particularly easy for nice regular, round objects like planets (eg each 90 or 120 deg), most mo-cap studios use more because of concave shapes and occultation. How do you think they do satellite weather images?

Google are hard at work trying to turn their streetview images into 3D objects for nice smooth moving around, etc.

You can even do this bullet time via 3D reconstruction on smartphones - 'Bullet Time' App Lets Ordinary Smartphones Take Photos Like In 'The Matrix' | Gadgets | Australian Popular Science

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=54c_1319310704

That's not really what I mean though. Right now we have amazing artist impressions of Pluto. I mean an actual 4k bullet time video without needing to reconstruct. Google already has street view and aerial photos to develop 3d reconstruction but there's a certain amount of stitching that makes it not quite real, even if we can't tell. What I'm saying would be an actual split second of time around Pluto, no pretence.

But like I say, a massive waste of money for something less important than royal commissions into unions.

Easy stuff these days.

Pix4D, Acute3D among others.

Was playing with Acute3D last week. 3D model was very impressive.