REAL LIFE NEWS: NEW HORIZONS SENDS ITS FINAL FLYBY DATA
by Hazed
NASA’s New Horizons mission left Pluto last summer and has been heading to the outer reaches of the Solar System. All that time it has been sending the information it gleaned about the dwarf planet back to Earth, and now the last bit of data from the Pluto flyby has arrived.
The final item was a segment of an observation sequence of Pluto and its moon Charon, taken with the probe’s Ralph/LEISA imager. The total amount of data received was in excess of 50 gigabits.
“The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “There’s a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do – after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?”
Once the data has been verified, the probe’s two onboard recorders will be erased, to leave space for new data during the next part of its mission: visiting several Kuiper Belt objects in early 2019.
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-returns-last-bits-of-2015-flyby-data-to-earth
