The NASA probe New Horizons Tuesday, ‘flies’ along the dwarf planet Pluto gescheerd. The probe departed on 19 January 2006 and is now at 4.8 billion kilometres of the earth to take pictures of Pluto and its moons.
To 13.49 found New Horizons with 12.500 miles on the shortest distance to the surface of Pluto. The distance makes it possible for the first time detailed images of the planet. For these images reach the earth, it takes some time: the files with a speed of 1kbit/s are sent. The photos were to closely Wednesday night should be available. This involves, in the first instance to compressed pictures, in time seep out of the lossless images.
In recent days, the New Horizons photos of the dwarf planet. These images were a great ‘heart’, and a crater that NASA the ‘whale’ because of the shape of a walvisstaart. Also appeared as Charon on the images: the moon of Pluto, which is 1,200 km half of the diameter of Pluto and also has a much darker surface features. Pluto itself has a diameter that is slightly less than one-fifth of that of the earth.
New Horizons makes a connection to the earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network. The data packets come in at the New Horizons Mission Operations Center, where they are extracted and analyzed. Not all data is directly forwarded. New Horizons has two ssd’s 8GB of on-board to store data: a primary storage source, and as a back-up.
The probe is capable of data 2kbit/s to send, when using both transmitters. Even then it takes until the end of 2016 to all of the data collected to the earth. The instruments are mounted on the probe and the transmission is thus also depending on the position.
New Horizons has several onboard instruments to, among other things, information about the atmosphere, geology and the conditions on the surface. The probe continues its journey continue, our solar system.
