1970s computer graphics still valid

Articles · Old Games News archive

Pione

The pixilated, blocky graphics of the seventies went out in…well…the seventies, didn’t they? Maybe, maybe not. While retro gamers find ample nostalgic value in the ways of old, modern scientists usually do not. Until now.

The solar probes Pioneer 10 and 11 have been slowing down since their launch into orbit almost forty years ago. They were designed to explore the galaxy beyond Mars, most notably the Jupiter environment. Their inexplicable slowing has been given the title Pioneer Anomaly and has befuddled the best astrophysicists for over a decade.

How unusual, then, that this conundrum was possibly solved using the 3D graphics technique known as Phong Shading…which dates all the way back to the seventies. Scientists in Lisbon have used the heat dissipation from the probes and Phong Shading to determine that they really aren’t all that slow. They have just been being incorrectly measured.