Belated bullet

Slow computers can make even the most patient person impatient. But knowing the normal lag when communicating with the distant Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft of the United States space agency NASA may make one tolerate old PCs.

NASA engineers waited five months before getting ungarbled data from Voyager 1 due to a communication glitch. Ironically, the radio signal to mission control on Earth was steady.

When the spacecraft resumed sending coherent data on 20 April, communication returned to normal, which meant NASA engineers waited for over 22 hours for their radioed command to be received by Voyager 1. A similar waiting period follows Voyager 1’s response.

The delayed travel of the communication signal between Earth and Voyager 1 is not unusual, as the 46-year-old spacecraft launched in the 1970s is already 24 billion kilometers away from the planet.

For the punctual Japanese, their so-called bullet trains are always on time for arrival and departure at stations. With speeds of 285 kilometers per hour, the bullet train operator calculated travel delay to be only 0.2 minutes on average.

However, the train’s reputation was smeared on 16 April when one unit was forced to stop for several minutes due to a rare emergency.

The 17-minute hold-up was for transferring passengers from one train to another after a 40-centimeter (nearly 16-inch) serpent was reported lurking on a train between Nagoya and Tokyo.

“It was unclear whether the cold-blooded commuter was venomous or how it ended up on the train, and there was no injury or panic among passengers,” a Central Japan Railway Company spokesperson told Agence France-Presse.

“We have rules against bringing snakes into the shinkansen,” the spokesperson added.