how is it possible for NASA to establish a signal/connections so far in outer space but we can’t find signals in certain rooms in our homes?
In: Physics
Many people here have mentioned how signals can travel easier through vacuum and are sent with higher power than usual, but there is another much more important technique – forward error correction.
Imagine that you wanted to send the message 001001 between two mountain tops by voice during a windy or noisy day. If you just shouted “ZERO” or “ONE” some of those might get missed or swapped but if instead you shouted a sequence representing zero like “CAT DOG MOUSE FISH BIRD” and a sequence representing one like “BLUE RED GREEN YELLOW ORANGE” you dramatically raise the chance of the other person hearing one of those words and if they all are unique and the order is known, you can reconstruct the message easily even with little information actually received.
It is important to note that you absolutely destroy the rate of information transfer to gain improvements in noise reduction. There are many techniques like this that NASA uses for error correction to ensure that the data they get arrives without error, without requiring much much larger receivers and transmitters than required.
I worked on a program that was targeted design a transmitter capable of sending 1ish watt (1/1000th the power of a microwave) signals from Alpha Centauri back to our solar system – a distance of 4.367 Light Years or 25.67 trillion miles.
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