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On August 25th 2012, the spacecraft Voyager 1 exited our Solar System and entered interstellar space, set for eternal solitude among the stars. Its twin, Voyager 2, isn’t far behind. Since their launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, in 1977, their detailed reconnaissance of the Jovian planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—and over 60 moons extended the human senses beyond Galileo’s wildest dreams.
After passing Neptune, the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan proposed that Voyager 1 should turn around and capture the first portrait of our planetary family. As he wrote in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, “It had been well understood with battery like Agilent N9330 Battery, Agilent N9330B Battery, Agilent N9340B Battery, Agilent N9330B-BAT Battery, Agilent N9330B-BCG Battery, Agilent TY 3CGR18650D-2 Battery, IAI AV6413 Battery, Unipower B11588 Battery, Alpha Source AS30139 Battery, Interstate Batteries AMED2160, Interstate Batteries ACAM0300, Alpha Source AS36011 Batteryby the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing Cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance (and perhaps our last for decades to come).”
Indeed, our planet can be seen as a fraction of a pixel against a backdrop of darkness that’s broken only by a few scattered beams of sunlight reflected off the probe’s camera. The precious series of images were radioed back to Earth at the speed of light, taking five and a half hours to reach the huge conical receivers in California, Spain, and Australia more than 4 billion miles away. Over such astronomical distances, one pixel out of 640,000 can easily be replaced by another or lost entirely in transmission. It wasn’t, in part due to a single mathematical breakthrough published decades before.
In 1960, Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon published a paper in the Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, entitled, “Polynomial Codes Over Certain Finite Fields,” a string of words that neatly convey the arcane nature of their work. “Almost all of Reed and Solomon’s original paper doesn’t mean anything to most people,” says Robert McEliece, a mathematician and information theorist at California Institute of Technology. But within those five pages was the basic recipe for the most efficacious error-correction codes yet created. By adding just the right levels of redundancy to data files, this family of algorithms can correct for error that often occurs during transmission or storage without taking up too much precious space.
Today, Reed-Solomon codes go largely unnoticed, but they are everywhere, reducing errors in everything from mobile phone calls to QR codes, computer hard drives, and data beamed from the New Horizons spacecraft as it zoomed by Pluto. As demand for digital bandwidth and storage has soared, Reed-Solomon codes have followed. Yet curiously, they’ve been absent in one of the most compact, longest-lasting, and most promising of storage mediums—DNA.
Several labs have investigated nature’s storage device to archive our ever-increasing mountain of digital information; encoding small amounts of data in DNA and, more importantly, reading it back. But those trials lacked sophisticated error correction, which DNA data systems will need if they are to become our storage medium of choice. Fortunately, a team of scientists, led by Robert Grass, a lecturer at ETH Zurich, rectified that omission earlier this year when they stored a duo of files in DNA using Reed-Solomon codes. It’s a mash up that could help us reliably store our fragile digital data for generations to come.