Brief Pluto Flyby, Enduring Scientific Harvest
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.