Cav's Place

Last night, at 2:53 AM GMT, the signal confirming that New Horizons has come out of hibernation for the final time before its Pluto encounter was received. Of course, in itself that wasn’t a major event and there was little cause for concern, seeing as the spacecraft has spent most of the time since its January 19, 2006 launch in 18 hibernation periods, occasionally waking up to check systems and test various procedures, but the event’s importance is given by what comes next.
After the instruments and systems will be thoroughly verified over the coming weeks, the encounter phase will begin on January 15 and last until some time after the July 14 flyby. Then, after the team will take a well-deserved break in August, the data will be downloaded and analyzed, the problem being that the bit rate that can be achieved from such a great distance is so low that the process will take several months at best. As such, on top of the fact that this is the main factor limiting the total amount of data that the spacecraft will be able to gather, it will be an exercise in frustration to wait for every little new piece of information, knowing it was obtained months before and any hardware or software glitch that may appear during that time may cause data to be altered, corrupted or completely lost.

But this is a post that, due to difficulties with my Internet access, I have to write without being able to search for any additional information, so I guess I’ll stop here for now, especially since I’ll also need to figure out how to post it under these circumstances. After all, the important part will come over the course of 2015 and we’ll be well into 2016 before all the data will be downloaded, so there will be much more to say then, when it’ll all start to ever so slowly trickle in.