Why does it take up to 16 months to send the latest data from Pluto to Earth?

Yesterday NASA announced the clearest picture of Pluto, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft after completing its mission to approach this star since 2006.

It takes up to 16 months to send the latest data from Pluto to Earth

Yesterday NASA announced the clearest picture of Pluto , taken by the New Horizons spacecraft after completing its mission to reach this star since 2006. This is an important milestone in the history of discovery. human universe, why Pluto is one of the most distant asteroids in the solar system.

This photo was taken around 4 am and until 21 pm NASA received. With the distance between Earth and Pluto up to nearly 5 billion km , the transfer of data from the New Horizons spacecraft to NASA is not a simple thing.

And after sending this photo, it will take up to 16 months for NASA spacecraft to send back the latest data it has collected today. That is also why in addition to the above picture, we have not received the most important information.

The data after being collected from New Horizons sensors, cameras and measuring devices will be stored in one of two solid-state memory capacities of 8 gigabytes.

Then the ship's main processor will arrange and reformat these data in compressed form , in preparation for sending it to Earth. The New Horizons spacecraft communicates with Earth through four pan antennas. For important scientific data, it will use the largest antenna, with a diameter of 2.1 meters.

Most of the signal transmission in the universe uses X-rays with a frequency range of 8-12 GHz and it takes about 4.5 hours to travel from New Horizons to Earth.

However there is a huge difficulty, that the data beam sent back only has an expansion angle of 0.3 degrees. It also means that it must point straight to Earth with the highest accuracy, just a little deviation from the distance of 5 billion km can also cause the beam to deviate completely from Earth.

When New Horizons sent data, most of the time it turned to Earth, which meant that we only received images from one side of Pluto. Today the spacecraft will begin to pass through the hidden area of ​​Pluto, between this star and the Moon Charon to continue collecting data.

So the spacecraft will no longer be facing us, which means it cannot send data again until it completes a circuit around Pluto's orbit. Specifically, it would take 16 months for New Horizon to turn around around Pluto and continue toward Earth.

Data transfer rate in the universe is equivalent to dial-up network

NASA collects data from its satellites and spacecraft in a wireless network called Deep Space.

In it, the data from New Horizons is sent at about 2,000 bits per second.

In order to clearly see how the 5 billion km distance affects the data transfer rate, we can compare the above speed with the data transfer rate when New Horizons has just been launched. cylindrical in 2007. That's 38 kilobits per second.

New Horizons' current data transfer rates are only equivalent to our dial-up internet network speeds. It also means that it takes hours for NASA to receive a very small photo or packet.

To send a few hundred KB photos, it took us nearly 5 hours, so sending hundreds of MB data would take a lot of time.

According to the plan, around tonight NASA will receive the final data sent from the New Horizon spacecraft . After that, we will have to wait about 16 months, after the spacecraft completes orbit around Pluto to get new data.