My previous post about the New Horizons flyby of Pluto was dated a few hours before the event of 14 July 2015. Communication with Earth by the spacecraft was turned off so it could execute a large number of commands during the few hours of flyby. The data is to be transmitted to Earth in the months to come. Late in the day, New Horizons phoned home to say it was healthy and did succeed in carrying out the commands. It continues to gather data and return data sets each day. Where is New Horizons now? It is coasting beyond Pluto into the Kuiper Belt. It has more work to do.
There are 50 gigabytes of data stored onboard. It will take 500 days to send it to Earth. People wonder why it will take so long? They want to see the results NOW! Here is the answer from…
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