The signal from New Horizons travels at the speed of light. The spacecraft is about 32 AUs (astronomical units) from Earth. That means it is 32 times farther away from the Earth than the Sun is from Earth. It takes sunlight about eight minutes to reach Earth. Multiply that out by 32 and we can see that it takes about 4 hours and 25 minutes for a signal to travel from New Horizons current location to the receiving antennae on Earth.
But that doesn't mean an image reaches Earth 4 hours and 25 minutes after it was taken. At New Horizon's great distance, it has to transmit at a very low data rate to keep the signal quality acceptable. New Horizons can transmit the data at about 1000 bits per second. That means it takes about 45 minutes to send back one picture.
So, as New Horizons flew past Pluto it took as many images and instrument readings as it could and stored all of that information on solid state recorders. It will slowly trickle all of that information back to Earth over the next 16 months or so. The process is not continuous, because sometimes there isn't a good line-of sight and sometimes the vehicle needs to send other data.
Read other answers by Robert Frost on Quora:
- NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, launched to study Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects is slated to reach Pluto in July 2015 and when it does that, it is intended to fly within 10,000 km of Pluto. Why not any closer?
- Would it be possible for someone to take a one-way 9 year trip to Pluto?
- Why is NASA sending a submarine to Saturn's moon Titan?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2dYTFQF
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