NASA's Pluto Probe Beams Back Final Data from Historic Flyby
Source: Space.com
NASA's Pluto Probe Beams Back Final Data from Historic Flyby
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | October 28, 2016 07:30am ET
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has finally finished beaming home all of the data it gathered during its historic July 2015 flyby of Pluto.
The last piece of flyby data reached mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, early Tuesday morning (Oct. 25), NASA officials said. New Horizons is currently 3.4 billion miles (5.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, so it takes signals moving at the speed of light more than 5 hours to journey between the probe and its handlers.
"The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
"There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth," Stern added. "And that's exactly what we're going to do. After all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?"
[font size=1]-snip-[/font]
Read more: http://www.space.com/34539-new-horizons-pluto-flyby-data.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
