• bitfucker@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        That “real time” on out of earth scale always boggles my mind. Technically it is as fast as it possibly could, knowing that radio waves travels at the speed of light. But damn, that light has to travel for a long time before arriving so “real time” data that arrives is technically “quite old” data.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          6 months ago

          The latency to Voyager 1 is apparently a bit under 23 hours, so yeah, that’s gonna be painful.

          I’d guess that the jitter is probably zero.

          Like, if they can pull data in realtime, I assume that they’ve chosen an encoding with enough redundancy that data can get through reliably at that rate. Because of the latency, they’d have to have a huge buffer if they wanted to have some protocol that required frequently requesting retransmits.