NASA New Horizons Begins Intensive Data Download, Revealing Detailed New Pluto

NASA’s New Horizons probe, which made its flyby of Pulto on July 14 and gathered information on the planet and its moons, began its downlink phase on Saturday, according to Gizmag.

New Horizons sent some images and measurements back to its handlers immediately after the encounter, but stored the vast majority onboard for later transmission. “It’s a treasure trove”. Its journey included a flyby of Pluto and its many moons. The spacecraft has officially begun its intensive data downlink phase, while will tell scientists more than ever about the tiny dwarf planet. The body, which New Horizons is scheduled to reach in 2019, will be the first object targeted by the spacecraft that was found after it was launched from Earth, noted the blog.

“… As an instrument makes an observation, data is transferred to a solid-state recorder – similar to a flash memory card for a digital camera – where it’s compressed, reformatted, and transmitted to Earth through the spacecraft’s radio telecommunications system, a 2.1-meter high-gain antenna”.

“This is what we came for – these images, spectra and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time”, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “And what’s coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that’s still aboard the spacecraft-it’s the best datasets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric datasets, and more”.

This is the biggest challenge for the New Horizons as the low “downlink” rate at which data can be transmitted to Earth can put anyone off when it is compared to rates now common for high-speed Internet surfers. Even at its fastest pace, though, the downlink rate is only at one to four kilobits per second.

“For one, consider that the information has to travel more than three billion miles”, said Rienzi, explaining why it will take so long to receive the information.