On 12/5/10 8:28 PM, Florian Obser wrote:
Hi, so, I had a look at the probe locations at https://atlas.ripe.net/ looks like there is a probe on every continent... except Antarctica! How cool would that be! Maybe there is someone on this list who knows someone who knows someone... ;) The south pole (Scott-Amundsen base) would be the place to go! It'd be real cool to have an Atlas probe there, given the challenges in connectivity.
"*What technical challenges do you face?* Our biggest challenge is bandwidth. We only have it only 12 hours a day at anywhere from T-1 (1.54 Mbit/sec) to 3 Mbit/sec speeds. We also have a transponder that we can use to send 60 Mbit/sec unidirectional from the pole to the real world. We use that to upload scientific data. Our record was 94Gbytes out in one day. We have three different satellites we use to provide our Internet. All of those are pretty ancient. We have a weather satellite, an old maritime communications satellite and an old NASA <http://www.computerworld.com/action/inform.do?command=search&searchTerms=NASA> satellite, the first one that was launched back in 1981. The others were launched in 1976 or 1977. Basically we're scavenging whatever we can find and we can only see each satellite for 3 to 4 hours a day. [...] In the past year we put up a really cool system where we're using the Iridium satellite network. We have 12 modems mulitiplexed together and have a total of 28.8K connectivity 24 x 7." That was December 2007. Don't think much has changed, at this moment the webcam at http://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm reports " Status: waiting for visibility" ... ;)
While discussing this with a friend we both noticed that the coolness could only be topped by a probe on ISS. Looking at the registration page this seems easy enough, "Method of delivery*: Other, please specify: Soyus or Ariane 5" "Hosting Location" on the other hand will probably be a pain in the ass.
South pole would already be tricky. Which longitude to use for the probe? Anything between 180W and 180E is valid! And by the looks of it, it would fall off of the google map :-) -- Rene