MEXICO: As NASA’s New Horizons continues on its lonely journey through deep space, it will be hard at work transmitting a trove of data and images from its Pluto encounter back to Earth.
Traveling at the speed of light, signals take 4.5 hours to travel three billion miles to reach Earth, meaning the spacecraft has an enormous undertaking ahead of it. With data downlinking at a rate of approximately one to four kilobits per second, it’s expected the entire trove of science from the July 14 encounter will take one year to be transmitted back to Earth.
Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, said the trove of information coming back to Earth over the course of the next year will help scientists gain a better understanding of Pluto’s origins and the dwarf planet’s evolution.
“What’s coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that’s still aboard the spacecraft — it’s the best data sets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric data sets, and more,” Stern said in a statement. “It’s a treasure trove.”
Launched in January 2006 on a three billion-mile journey to Pluto, New Horizons “phoned home” after its Pluto flyby, indicating that it had successfully navigated just 7,700 miles from the dwarf planet. It later sent back the first high-resolution images of Pluto’s surface.
New Horizons conserved energy by taking “naps” during the monumental trip. The spacecraft, equipped with a battery that converts radiation from decaying plutonium into electricity, may have enough power for two more decades of exploration, according to NASA.
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