Waspie_Dwarf Posted October 27, 2016 #1 Share Posted October 27, 2016 New Horizons Returns Last Bits of 2015 Flyby Data to Earth Quote NASA’s New Horizons mission reached a major milestone this week when the last bits of science data from the Pluto flyby – stored on the spacecraft’s digital recorders since July 2015 – arrived safely on Earth. Having traveled from the New Horizons spacecraft over 3.4 billion miles, or 5.5 billion kilometers (five hours, eight minutes at light speed), the final item – a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager – arrived at mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25. The downlink came via NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months. Read More: NASA 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Merc14 Posted October 28, 2016 #2 Share Posted October 28, 2016 Watching this mission from launch through the years of travel and hibernation has been a very interesting chapter in my life of loving all things re. space exploration. To see this flyby mission do so well, after all those years, is especially rewarding and so well done by the engineers and science team. Now she is off to another target with no failures noted. What an accomplishment and how unique and unexpected is Pluto? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waspie_Dwarf Posted October 28, 2016 Author #3 Share Posted October 28, 2016 (edited) 9 hours ago, Merc14 said: and how unique and unexpected is Pluto? Unexpected? Undoubtedly. Unique? Who knows? There are a fair few large Kuiper Belt objects out there. We don't know how similar they are to Pluto. What we need is New Horizons 2, New Horizons 3, etc. Let's take a look at Eris, Makemake and Haumea and the new objects which keep being found. Edited October 28, 2016 by Waspie_Dwarf typo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Merc14 Posted October 28, 2016 #4 Share Posted October 28, 2016 5 hours ago, Waspie_Dwarf said: Unexpected? Undoubtedly. Unique? Who knows? There are a fair few large Kuiper Belt objects out there. We don't know how similar they are to Pluto. What we need is New Horizons 2, New Horizons 3, etc. Let's take a look at Eris, Makemake and Haumea and the new objects which keep being found. Completely agree and well said. The KB, I believe, is full of surprises and well worth exploring. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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