The mission team has begun the intensive down linking of the massive data the spacecraft gathered and stored on its digital recorders. Seven weeks after New Horizons sped past the Pluto system to study the new world.
The process for entire down liking taking about one year to complete, which started on 5 Sept. the study of Pluto system will provide us different types of collection data like images, spectra and others information. Therefore researcher understands the origin and the evolution of Pluto.
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern (Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.) said that it will be the best dataset, and high quality resolution images and spectra.
Even moving at light speed, the radio signals from New Horizons containing data need more than four and a half hours to cover the three billion miles to reach Earth. New Horizons has only been sending back lower data speed information gathered by the energetic particle, solar wind and space dust instruments.
During the period of down linking the spacecraft is sending science and collected data to NASA’s Deep Space Network. Hal Weaver added in NASA’s statement this mission has required patience for many years. But from the small amount of data we saw around the Pluto flyby.
The team also plans to continue updating new, unprocessed images from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on the New Horizons project website each Friday.
