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The Register's resident space boffin: All you need to know about the Pluto mission

Meeting a cold dwarf hasn't put off NASA one bit

Packing the equipment

Planetary missions often have extremely tense periods where all the mission team’s years of dedicated work are riding on a successful launch, landing, or orbital insertion. Although, thankfully, losses are rare, there are few who’d honestly admit to some nail-biting periods despite professing full confidence in their spacecraft and mission plan.

In the early hours GMT of 15 July, 14 hours after closest approach, the good news was received: New Horizons was alive and well, and had packed its two solid state recorders with a treasure trove of data.

New Horizons’s seven instruments provide all the key measurements needed to characterize a planetary body. As well as a high resolution black and white camera, it carries a colour camera and spectrometer that extends to the infrared range.

Sorry, gotta go! Closing in on Jupiter, only to say bye bye

An ultraviolet camera and spectrometer completes the remote sensing suite. Other instruments are carried to detect the solar wind that streams from the Sun past Pluto, and a student-built device measures dust impacts. A final instrument makes use of the radio dish to probe Pluto’s atmosphere and to get an accurate measure of the dwarf planet’s mass.

To get efficient data rates, images and other results are compressed on board, and a carefully-considered data return plan means that lossy compressed images are returned to Earth first for a first look, and only later will the full dataset with lossless compression be transmitted.

The first images received after the encounter suffer from compression artifacts, as expected, but are of high enough quality for initial analysis work. The 15 Gbits of full resolution data won’t be all sent back to Earth for 16 months as the signals from the craft trickle in from 4.7 billion kilometers away.

What did New Horizons find? Surprises. Even from the first images, it’s already clear that at least part of the surface of Pluto is young. Planets and moons are continually being bombarded by debris, so the older a surface is, the more impact craters it has on its surface.

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