New Horizons spent nine years racing toward Pluto, swept through its historic encounter in hours, then needed 15 months to send the complete record of that brief passage back across billions of miles to Earth
NASA’s New Horizons mission compressed years of engineering and navigation into several crucial hours near Pluto. According to NASA’s official data return report, the spacecraft later needed more than 15 months to transmit the complete record of that encounter back to Earth. The timing exposed one of the defining challenges of exploring the outer solar…
