If you are any kind of geek or into astronomy…(and I’m both!!)….then today was a great day!!
New Horizons image of Pluto from a couple of days before flyby (Image Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI)
The NASA probe New Horizons had it’s close encounter with Pluto, flying by the planet at a distance of only 7750 miles, and collecting a ton of data! And it survived the flyby just fine I might add. All this data though, will take about 16 months to fully transmit back to Earth…the probe is so far away from us that the data communications rate is only about 1 Kb per second. It will take about 45 minutes to transmit just one picture back to Earth. Incredible!!
Check out this story from NBC for a general update. For a really good technical story on how New Horizons transmits the data, check this out (note…it was written back in January).
Congratulations to NASA and the team at John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory!! Job well done!!
It’s really cool how they can send data from do far away. That still blows my mind.