Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. Today's episode hosted by Frank Chen is a conversation with Stanford senior scientists and astronomer Ivan Lindskot. And it is all about the juicy, nitty-gritty, mind-blowing details of how exactly you send a signal to Pluto.

Ivan Linscott is part of the team that helped the radio science experiment or Rex experiment that went up with the New Horizons

probe and will use radio transmissions to gather info about Pluto. He focuses on digital signal

processing, radio occultation experiments, I don't even know if I pronounce that right, observational

radio astronomy, and particle physics, and has worked at Dudley, NASA, and Unsetti. All of the

work has in common listening for signals

and doing radio science experiments in the outer planets. A16-Z, research and investing team

head Frank, begins a conversation by sharing how he came across this work. So, I'm sitting at home,

and it was July of 2015 when all of the amazing pictures were coming back from New Horizons,

and I'm having a bunch of Wi-Fi problems at home.

And I'm thinking to myself, here we are.

There's a probe billions and billions of miles away that's sending photos,

and I have this huge Wi-Fi deadspot at home.

Like, what is going on? And as it turned out,

a couple of weeks later, I was talking with the fabulous Teresa Johnson. Shout out to Teresa,

who is now a data scientist at Pinterest, but she studied with Professor Lynn Scott. And she's like,

oh, I know the guy who helped design that system. Let me introduce you. And so I got introduced to Ivan and he started telling me stories about the design process and the mission. And it was just so fascinating that I was convinced that you would be excited to hear Ivan's stories. And so here we are.

I mean, maybe you can tell us a little bit about

yourself and how you got involved in communication systems design. Thanks, Frank. I got to Stanford a long

time ago because of my interest in the SETI project. We had been developing high-performance spectroscopy

in radio systems for looking at Pulsars in small observatory, Dudley

Observatory in the east and connected in New York, has a postdoc there. And one of the applications

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