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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.

9 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. New.Horizons.-.Pluto.Data.Pack.FULL-NASA.torrent by CanEHdian · · Score: 4, Funny

    What'd you expect with only one seeder? It would take ages to complete.

    --
    When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
  2. Some of these humans are exceedingly clever by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  3. Re:Pluto? Who cares! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  4. Last bit of data by rossdee · · Score: 5, Funny

    Was it a 1 or a 0

  5. Re:Last bit of data by azcoyote · · Score: 2

    That was exactly my thought when I read the headline. I figured that the download was stuck at 99% and they were just waiting on that one last bit.

    --
    Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
  6. NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Sends Back Last Bit by rickyslashdot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 !

    --
    redneck geek
  7. Re:5 hours just to get to Pluto by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 3, Interesting

    20th century SF thought it'd be cryonegenics, but I believe biological immortality will be the answer. While stopping aging is, like the cure a cancer, still vapourware despite people promising over and over that "it's close", it's safe to assume it'll be done in no more than 50-100 years. Then, we'll discover some new health conditions that appear only at the age of 200+ and kill people, these will need to be dealt with. Then, a new generation will have similar problems at the age of 1000+. But fast forward a few such iterations and humans will really live forever,

    According to Isaac Asimov, that will be the death knell of the human race.

    accidents,

    No one will do anything dangerous anymore. Now we have people risking their lives, willing to chance losing 40-80 years, for the thrill of the moment. When people can expect to live 1000 years, who is going to go skydiving in their first century and chance losing 900 years of life? Those few that do, or who start later, will eventually weed themselves out of the population. Not just skydiving of course, but racing, scuba diving, rock climbing, and other "thrill sports".

    Traffic accidents will eventually be all but eliminated for the same reason. No one will drive themselves, once self-driving cars get to the point of near-complete safety. And many people will stop going out anyway, because those self-driving cars can deliver groceries, clothes, toys, etc. with no need to risk death by going to the store or shopping malls.

    murder

    will happen at times, but again, as time goes on, the people who would perform this activity will be removed from society.

    and heat death of the Universe notwithstanding.

    We'll never survive to see it.

    Then there's hard AI, which can also be considered a form of earthlings...

    More likely than human immortality, but then you have to worry about Skynet.

    --
    If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
  8. Re:Pluto? Who cares! by Potor · · Score: 2

    People seem to use "anymore" incorrectly these days, or the meaning is really shifting. My students seem to use it to mean "these days," whereas when I was growing up it had the connotation of "no longer".

  9. Re: 5 hours just to get to Pluto by KiloByte · · Score: 2

    rampant overpopulation because no one enforced this rule: if you want to be immortal you can have no kids, no not even one.

    And why do you assume the poor will be immortal? At least initially, the cost of life prolonging measures will be enormous -- and the rich are the ones to set the rules. Do you expect them to make rules that hurt only themselves?

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.