Data Transfer from New Horizons

It is going to take a while.

As we wait for the New Horizons Data to be returned to Earth it is worth considering the difficulty in getting it back. 2.9 billion miles is a long way away for a radio signal. This is not the record, we can still communicate with the Voyager spacecraft at over 12 billion miles out. Unlike Voyager, there is a great deal of data in the memory of New Horizons, we want it here on Earth ASAP.

Each LORRI image is a 1Mpix image at a 12bit depth, even with image compression this is 2.5Mbyte per image. LORRI was one of three cameras taking imagery during the encounter, there is also the data from Alice and Ralph. At the distance of Pluto about the best data transfer rate we can expect is around 1Kbit/sec. I am old enough to remember the days when a 1200 baud modem was state-of-the-art, large files were painful. At this data rate it will take about sixteen months for the entire Pluto encounter data set to be returned to Earth. I can only imagine the anticipation within the mission team, waiting for their data to be arrive.