After traveling for 10 years and 5.5 billion kilometers, the last signal given by the probe New Horizons with information collected during the flyby of Pluto he has come to Earth, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland.
The speed of light New Horizons would arrive where he is today in 5 hours and 8 minutes
The message has arrived at the radio telescope in the Deep Space Network, in Canberra (Australia), and from there to the reference laboratory. In the space of 15 months, they are so arrived over 50 Gbit of information, images and data on the dwarf planet farthest solar system.
READY FOR NEW APPOINTMENT. "The data we have received about Pluto and its satellites have again and again surprised by the beauty and the unexpected complexity of that little planetary system," recalls Alan Stern, principal investigator of the mission. "But now we have all the elements to get to draw a complete picture: we have a lot of work to do to analyze and deepen over 400 scientific observations come to Earth."
The NASA spacecraft was launched in 2006 and flew over Pluto and its moons in July 2015. Because of its speed during overflights could not gather the information and relay it back to Earth at the same time: for this reason it was decided that they were stowed in his memory, moving sending when more favorable. So it was, and sending everything required several months.
Now researchers will review all the data arrived at Earth, after which the probe memory will be erased so that it can get close to the small body of the Kuiper Belt, known as 2014 MU69 (presumably January 1, 2019), ready to gather new information to send to Earth.
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