The US space agency, NASA (for its acronym in English) reported today that New Horizons took 1200 pictures Pluto and its satellites, although not yet reached the Earth.
The scientists will receive the treasure of information collected. “It will be like opening a birthday every day from now until the end of next year,” said Bonnie Buratti, a researcher at the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
What happened. On Tuesday, at 8.49 hours Argentina, New Horizons made history: he reached the point of closest approach to Pluto, 12,000 km above the Ecuador dwarf planet. Then he turned to make history to send the most accurate images that are the integral ninth solar system.
New Horizons, which flies driven by the heat generated by 12 kilos dioxide Plutonium (predicted to do so until 2030), is now moving away from Pluto and in the dark in search of unknown objects and information in the Kuiper Belt.
camera. The Eagle Eye is the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORI). Its digital camera with no moving parts protected with a structure of almost nine kilos, record monochromatic images of high resolution of 1024 by 1024 pixels. It is one of the most energy-intensive instruments, about 5.8 watts.
Storage. The spacecraft has two units of solid state storage of 8 GB, one of They are supporting them. Once registered the scan data of Pluto, this information will take about 16 months to reach Earth.
Transmission. The probe uses a main antenna 2.1 meters in diameter for communications, along with other support. It has a transmission capacity of 1 kilobyte per second. The radio transmission takes to reach Earth about four hours and 25 minutes. After its passage by Pluto, the time increases two minutes per year. .
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