| That was a flip bit of stage-setting. I know little about space data transmission (though I vaguely recall some good discussion around the time of the New Horizons Pluto contact), but yes, it's been a mix of analog transmissions (initially) and digital, of various descriptions. I believe there is an IP-based transmission support for the ISS, though I wouldn't swear to that. One of the zaniest image transmission protocols was for the early Soviet lunar missions, Luna 3. Again, film cameras, an in-spacecraft photo processing lab, and a TV camera to read off the film image and transmit it back to Earth. The image quality wasn't much, but it was the first imagery of the Lunar farside ever received. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_3 A few years back there was a story of the National Geographic lunar map timed to coincide (well, a month late) with the December, 1968, Apollo 8 mission, the first manned flight around the Moon (though without a landing). This gave us the famous Earthrise photograph, and the Christmas Day broadcast from Apollo. The story of the map, and how rapidly the Lunar far side went from terra incognito (well, luna incognito) to mapped in detail was pretty staggering. I had that map as a kid, and just figured "we knew all that". Sometimes it takes growing up to see things with childlike wonder.... The story: http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=1481 http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=1588 (Pretty sure that's made HN at some point.) |