All Data From Pluto Finally Sent Back To Earth

It's been 15 months since the historic Pluto flyby, and NASA was finally able to finish downloading all the data from New Horizons.

The last item that they were able to download was a segment of an observation sequence about the planet and its largest moon, Charon - finally arriving at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory at 5:48 AM EDT on October 25.

According to IFL Science, this was the last of over 50 billion bits of data that had been transmitted over the months. Modern day computing systems would not be impressed - today, 50 billion bits translates to about 6.25 gigabytes - we have Blu-Ray DVD movies with larger files.

Today, New Horizons is moving at 14 kilometers per second, so it was designed to collect 100 times more data during its close approach than it could send home before it left Pluto's system.

Not that it was lagging - New Horizons was said to have started sending high-priority data as it was collected, the rest was downlinked beginning September 2015.

Alan stern, the New Horizons principal investigator from Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement: "The Pluto system data that New Horizons collected has amazed us over and over again with the beauty and complexity of Pluto and its system of moons."

He added, "There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that's exactly what we're going to do - after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?"

Not that there are no other plans to visit Pluto again - The New York Times noted that the New Horizons team is already planning its next encounter in 2019, and passing within 2,000 miles of a distant clump of red rock that is redder than Pluto, but less red than Mars, called the 2014 MU69.