NASA’s Pluto Probe Begins Downlinking Tens of GBs of Data

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft starts intensive downlinking of the data it collected and stored.

New Horizons science team reacts to seeing the spacecraft’s last and sharpest image of Pluto. (Photo: Reuters)

After its historic flyby of Pluto in July, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has just started intensive downlinking of the tens of gigabits of data it collected and stored on its digital recorders.

The process moved into high gear on September 5, with the entire downlink taking about one year to complete.

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.
– Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator

“And what’s coming is not just the remaining 95 per cent 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. It’s a treasure trove,” added Stern.

Even moving at light speed, the radio signals from New Horizons containing data need more than four and a half hours to cover the 3 billion miles to reach Earth.

As a flyby mission, New Horizons was designed to gather as much information as it could, as quickly as it could, as it sped past Pluto and its family of moons - then store its wealth of data to its digital recorders for later transmission to Earth.

Since late July, New Horizons has only been sending back lower data-rate information collected by the energetic particle, solar wind and space dust instruments.

The pace picked up considerably on September 5 as it resumed sending flyby images and other data.

With New Horizons past Pluto, the typical downlink rate is approximately 1-4 kilobits per second, depending on how the data is sent and which DSN antenna is receiving it.