"Can you hear me now?"

During my keynote at the COSI All-Team meeting recently, I spoke about our decades-long fascination with the erstwhile planet Pluto, culminating in the recent New Horizons mission to the outer solar system. I showed off some images beamed back from the spacecraft that truly inspire and amaze me, featuring nitrogen plains, mountains of water ice, and more.

Later that day Laurie Mille, Manager of Living Collections, shot me a quick followup email, asking how New Horizons can transit images across the vast reaches of empty interplanetary space - over 3 billion miles, in fact - but she can't get decent cell reception in the mountains of Vermont.

NASA and the New Horizons team have a few things going for them that Laurie's cell phone doesn't. Like, 700 million things. Sending probes to the furthest reaches of the solar system ain't cheap, and some of that money is devoted to making sure that "NH phone home".

Second, Laurie's phone doesn't tap into the NASA Deep Space Network, a collection of gigantic radio dishes and antennas dotted across the world. Those are some pretty sensitive ears, capable of hearing even the faintest echoes of our far-flung spacecraft.

Lastly, while the distances are impressive, the obstacles are not. Here's NASA's problem:

Earth...........*3 billion miles of absolutely nothing*.......New Horizons

And here's Laurie's problem:

phone....../\.../\../\.../\/\/\.../\/\/\.....*a bunch more mountains*....cell tower

Mountains aren't the best of friends to radio waves, so that presents a unique challenge that's hard to engineer around. But even with all that money, all that gear, and all that empty space, it still took over a year for New Horizons to beam back the data from the brief Pluto flyby.