NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Sends Back Last Bit of Data From 2015 Pluto Flyby (go.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the last bit of data from its 2015 flyby of Pluto. The picture -- one of a sequence of shots of Pluto and its big moon, Charon -- arrived earlier this week at Mission Control in Maryland. It took more than five hours for the image to reach Earth from New Horizons, some 3 billion miles away. New Horizons swooped past Pluto on July 14, 2015. It's now headed to an even smaller, frozen orb in the far reaches of the solar system. That close encounter is targeted for 2019. Mission managers opted to save all the Pluto data on New Horizons' digital recorders, in order to maximize observing time. Only the highest priority sets of information were sent back in the days before and after the flyby, providing humanity's first up-close look at Pluto. It wasn't until September 2015 when the real data transmission began. In all, more than 50 gigabits of data were relayed over the past 15 months to Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The final data arrived Tuesday, and NASA announced the safe arrival Thursday.

Comments

Some of these humans are exceedingly clever

[rmdingler]

3 billion miles... NASA's receiving data from Pluto and the New Horizons spacecraft is headed for MU69.

Meanwhile, at work, we can't get folks to stop clicking email links.

Re:Pluto? Who cares!

[Anonymous Coward]

pluto will forever and always be a *real* planet as far as i'm concerned.. at least up until it is blasted to smithereens by a poorly-aimed illudium pu-36 space modulator.

NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Sends Back Last Bit

[rickyslashdot]

Incredible - - - the greatest feat of NASA's efforts to observe - close-up - the last planet (ooops, planetoid / whatever) - and the highest rating the comments get is a "FUNNY".

This ranks right up there with the first moon landing, the first Mars Rover, and the Jupiter and Saturn missions.

Come on, people - this is SLASHDOT - where there are "PURPORTEDLY" semi-intelligent people reading and commenting - - - even the editors deserve a kick in the ass for trivializing this stupendous feat !