THE INTERNET AT THE END OF THE EARTH

How do you transmit high-resolution images of exoplanets when your internet connection is only 80Kbits/sec? James O’Malley meets an astronomer in Antarctica to find out

For most of us, updating our software requires merely tapping on the app store and watching a progress bar track across the screen for a few seconds. For George Dransfield, however, it wasn’t so easy. Last summer she had to board a plane, fly to Hobart in Australia, then after a spell in quarantine, take another plane to Wilkins Aerodrome on the coast of Antarctica. After a bus ride to Casey Station and one final flight on board a tiny Basler turboprop, she arrived at her final destination: Concordia Station, which sits 680 miles inland. She came armed with a couple of portable hard drives and a laptop, with seven weeks to perform some critical software maintenance. Dransfield isn’t an Antarctic explorer but an astronomer. And her mission was to update the…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2023

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