Just seven weeks after its monumental flyby of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons space probe has begun transmitting the tens of gigabits of data it has collected from its July 14th encounter.
THE NEW HORIZONS JOURNEY
New Horizons was launched back in January 2006, as part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, designed to study the other planets within the Solar System. For six-months prior to its closest approach of Pluto, the interplanetary space probe has been hard at work, studying the dwarf planet and its various moons.
Following its historic flyby, New Horizons “phoned home” and began to send back high-res images of Pluto’s surface to Earth. The data transmission process then kicked into overdrive on September 5th, after having sent back lower data-rate information since late July.
The transfer, however, will take nearly a year to complete, given its data downlinking rate of approximately 1-4 kilobits per second. Even traveling at the speed of light, the data-containing radio signals will take roughly 4.5 hours to reach the Earth, located a distant three billion miles away.
Scientists have been eagerly waiting for the information in hopes of being able to understand the origin and evolution of Pluto. According to Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, the “treasure trove” of data will also be comprised of the “best datasets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric datasets, and more.”
WHAT’S NEXT FOR NEW HORIZONS?
New Horizons may have just enough juice left to power itself for two more decades of celestial exploration, although it does lose a few watts of power each year. Currently, the space probe is traversing through the Kuiper Belt, a region of the Solar System that extends beyond the planets. Following the completion of the data transmission, NASA is also considering an extended mission, wherein the space probe would head farther into the Kuiper Belt – at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit, according to NASA.
