THE INTERNET AT THE END OF THE EARTH

How do you transmit high-resolution images of exoplanets using an internet connection that’s stuck in the 1990s? James O’Malley meets an astronomer in Antarctica to find out

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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 isn’t so easy. Last summer, she boarded a plane to Hobart in Australia, then after a spell in quarantine, took another flight 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 destination: Concordia Station, which sits 680 miles inland. She had come armed with a couple of portable hard drives and a laptop, with seven weeks to perform some critical software maintenance.

Dransfield isn’t an explorer but an astronomer and her mission was to update the software that processes data collected by A-STEP, earth’s most remote space telescope. The epic journey was essential because the station lacks decent internet connectivity—and when the telescope’s images are 4,096 x 4,096 pixels each, that’s a problem.

“We spend the time taking images of the sky, and each image is about 150MB,” says Dransfield. “Like most telescopes, you download the raw images to a computer after a night of observing and then you process them yourself.”

It’s getting the images out of Antarctica that’s the tricky bit. The station has an internet connection back to the rest of the world, but it’s via satellite and can only reach dialup era speeds that would have last been considered impressive around 1996. “Our internet connection has recently been upgraded. We can now reach speeds of 80KB per second,” says Dransfield. “But we can’t get our raw data until someone goes the following year and puts it on a hard drive.”