NASA’s Pluto probe starts a year-long data upload
NASA’s New Horizons probe didn’t swing by Pluto just to snap a few photos and run off — it collected a ton of extra data that hasn’t seen the light of day. Well, it’s finally sending that data back to Earth… very, very slowly. The spacecraft has started an upload of “tens of gigabits” of information that, at a pokey 1KB to 4KB per second transfer rate, won’t finish until fall 2016. You’ll get raw photos from New Horizons every Friday, but it could take a long while before astronomers know exactly what they have on their hands. It may be worth the wait, mind you. If NASA’s initial burst of Pluto data was an eye-opener, you can imagine what a year’s worth of info might bring.
Filed under:
Science
Via:
io9
Source:
NASA
Tags: newhorizons, pluto, science, space
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