Note: Only forum leaders may delete posts.
*HTML is ON *UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend
Smilies Legend
[i]On Sunday, July 12, New Horizons will transmit the last of its optical navigation data. These images will have lower resolution than the images we have already received from Dawn at Ceres. Then, on Sunday and Monday, July 12 and 13, there will be a series of four "Fail Safe" downlinks. These are designed to return a minimum set of data from all instruments, just in case New Horizons does not survive the flyby. A last downlink ending overnight Monday July 13, called "E-Health 1," will include one last pre-closest approach photo of Pluto. Then there is a nail-biting 24-hour period of waiting while New Horizons concentrates on flyby science and does not communicate with Earth, followed by the much-anticipated beep of the "Phone Home" downlink on Tuesday night, July 14. Following closest approach, on Wednesday and Thursday, July 15 and 16, there will be a series of "First Look" downlinks containing a sampling of key science data. Another batch of data will arrive in the "Early High Priority" downlinks over the subsequent weekend, July 17-20. Then there will be a hiatus of 8 weeks before New Horizons turns to systematically downlinking all its data. ...for nearly two months, until September 14, New Horizons will switch to near-real-time downlinking of data from instruments that generate low data volumes (like SWAP and PEPSSI) while it transmits just housekeeping information for all of the rest of the data. No new images will arrive on the ground during this time. On September 14, New Horizons will begin downlinking a "browse" version of the entire Pluto data set, in which all images will be lossily compressed. It will take about 10 weeks to get that data set to the ground. There will be compression artifacts, but we'll see the entire data set. Then, around November 16, New Horizons will begin to downlink the entire science data set losslessly compressed. It will take a year to complete that process.[/i]
Contact Us | The Source for Space History & Artifacts
Copyright 1999-2024 collectSPACE. All rights reserved.