It will take NASA an entire year to download data from New Horizons about Pluto
Now that the New Horizons space probe has passed Pluto, NASA will begin downloading data from it. And because the wireless transmission is so weak, it has estimated that it will take up a year to download all of the data from the probe.
On July 14, 2015, the space probe New Horizons flew past Pluto. Launched into space on January 19, 2006, New Horizons was designed specially to study Pluto and it was a mission that was almost 10 years in the making.
Now that New Horizons has zipped past Pluto, NASA will begin its "intensive downlinking" phase of the mission, that is to download all of the data from New Horizons.
As you might expect, wireless transmissions over such vast distances in extremely wonky. And even though radio waves travel at the speed of light in space, it will take about 4.5 hours alone for the signal to travel to earth. According to NASA, they will be downloading data from New Horizons at a speed of just 1 to 4 kilobytes per second - that's equivalent to a 33.6kbps modem.
"If you were trying to browse the web with that kind of connection, you'd have to wait hours after clicking a link before the page even started to load, and then it'd take a few minutes just to download a standard webpage."
NASA says there's still over 95% of data to be downloaded from New Horizons and the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern, said, "It's a treasure trove."
NASA expects downloading to be completed by October next year, and the team will post a new photo every Friday, beginning this week.
Source: The Verge
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