[meteorite-list] NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft begins Intensive Data Downlink Phase

[Ron Baalke]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150904

NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft begins Intensive Data Downlink Phase
September 4, 2015

If you liked the first historic images of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons 
spacecraft, you'll love what's to come.

Seven weeks after New Horizons sped past the Pluto system to study Pluto 
and its moons - previously unexplored worlds - the mission team will 
begin intensive downlinking of the tens of gigabits of data the spacecraft 
collected and stored on its digital recorders. The process moves into 
high gear on Saturday, Sept. 5, with the entire downlink taking about 
one year to complete.

"This is what we came for - these images, spectra and other data types 
that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the 
Pluto system for the first time," said New Horizons Principal Investigator 
Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. 
"And what's coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data 
that's still aboard the spacecraft - it's the best datasets, the 
highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric 
datasets, and more. It's a treasure trove."

Even moving at light speed, the radio signals from New Horizons containing 
data need more than 4 - hours to cover the 3 billion miles to reach Earth.

As a flyby mission, New Horizons was designed to gather as much information 
as it could, as quickly as it could, as it sped past Pluto and its family 
of moons - then store its wealth of data to its digital recorders for 
later transmission to Earth. Since late July, New Horizons has only been 
sending back lower data-rate information collected by the energetic particle, 
solar wind and space dust instruments. The pace picks up considerably 
on Sept. 5 as it resumes sending flyby images and other data.

During the data downlink phase, the spacecraft transmits science and operations 
data to NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) of antenna stations, which also 
provide services to other missions, like Voyager. The spacecraft's distance 
from Earth slows communication rates, especially compared to rates offered 
by today's high-speed Internet providers. With New Horizons past Pluto, 
the typical downlink rate is approximately 1-4 kilobits per second, depending 
on how the data is sent and which DSN antenna is receiving it.

"The New Horizons mission has required patience for many years, but 
from the small amount of data we saw around the Pluto flyby, we know the 
results to come will be well worth the wait," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons 
project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory 
(APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

The team also plans to continue posting new, unprocessed pictures from 
the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the New Horizons project 
website each Friday. The images are available here; the next LORRI set 
is scheduled for posting on Sept. 11.

New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the 
agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. APL designed, 
built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission 
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, 
payload operations, and encounter science planning.