New Horizons is Still Only Halfway Through Its Download from Pluto | Daily Planet | Air & Space Magazine
http://www.airspacemag.com/...rizons-still-only-halfway-through-its-download-pluto-180958617/?no-ist
In December, when the team wrote the papers that appeared in the Science (academic publishing is not a quick process), the spacecraft had only sent home about a quarter of the data it gathered during its Pluto flyby last July. Since then, another quarter has “landed,” as principal investigator Alan Stern puts it, and mission scientists are busy analyzing it. That leaves half the flyby data—including thousands of images, chemical spectra, and other information—still stored on two solid-state drives aboard New Horizons, awaiting download.
Also still to come are information on the composition and structure of Pluto’s atmosphere and data that scientists will use to look for rings around Pluto. The last of the data won’t reach Earth until late October.
“We try to do it in priority order, so that the most important stuff was sent last year, and the least important stuff will be at the very tail end,” says Stern.
New Horizons sent the last of the highest-resolution images of Pluto and Charon earlier this month.
