Brief Pluto Flyby, Enduring Scientific Harvest
TL;DR
New Horizons zipped past Pluto in July 2015 for a rapid flyby that captured essential data as it sped by. Because of the great distance and limited power, the full Pluto dataset wasn’t downloaded until over 15 months later, with the final transmission arriving in October 2016, turning the brief encounter into a long-running scientific record that revealed Pluto as a geologically active, complex world.
- New Horizons flew past Pluto so quickly that an encounter nine years in the making was effectively over within hours — but the data gathered during that brief passage took another 15 months to trickle home Space Daily
- When the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in July of 2015 after a nine-and-a-half-year journey from Earth, it was traveling so fast — roughly 32,000 miles per hour — that it had less than 30 minutes to photograph the entire dwarf planet, and the images Space Daily
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