Photos from Pluto

A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

TIA

BJ

"Big John" wrote in message
om...
A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

TIA

BJ

The distance is something of the order of 5.7x10^9 km; dividing by the speed
of light (about 3x10^5km/s) then gives us (about) 1.6x10^4 seconds, or about
44 and 1/2 hours.

Incidentally (and this may sound pedantic but it's not) it is an image, not
a photo. The image is scanned, and transmitted, pixel by pixel, line by
line, not taken as a snapshot.

Cheers.

Ken

Big John wrote:
A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

TIA

BJ

Well, at a rough distance of about 40x farther from the Sun than we are,
and we are about 8 lightminutes from the Sun, the implication would be
40 x 8 or 320 minutes, rounding off quite substantially. But it is
ballparkish.

Big John wrote:
A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

It's a flyby, meaning it's only got a few hours closest to pluto.

The speed of light means that it'll take a bit over 12 hours for a
signal to get to earth.
Because the craft does not have unlimited power, this will be sent to
earth in a trickle, over the following days and weeks.

Big John wrote:
A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood?

One-way light-travel time from Pluto to Earth is around 6 hours.

ciao,

--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply"
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut),
Golm, Germany, "Old Europe" http://www.aei.mpg.de/~jthorn/home.html
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
-- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam

Once upon a time Big John sat by the fire and begun to tell a story:
A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

Pluto is roughly 5.5 light hours away from the Sun. For comparison, Earth
is about 8 light minutes away. This means that for any electromagnetic
waves, including light and radio waves, it takes just below 5 hours 30
minutes to get from Pluto to Earth.

The farthest man-made object is Voyager 1, which is roughly 100 AU away
(something like 13.5 hours of light speed travel). 1 AU = Sun-Earth distance,
i.e. ~149 000 000 km

Jarmo

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Jarmo Korteniemi * http://www.student.oulu.fi/~jkorteni *

Planetology group, Astronomy o o
Dept. of Physical Sciences |_/ Martian
P.O. Box 3000 *,* Owls
FI-90014 University of Oulu [`-´]
Finland ----"-"--,,-,,--
[ ^ ]
office: TÄ215 (corridor L2, 2nd floor) o--*_*--o
home: Purjehtijantie 8 A 4, 90560 Oulu
contact: phone: +358 (8) 553 1942 / GSM: +358 (45) 6362264
email: jarmo DOT#1 korteniemi AT oulu DOT#2 fi
ICQ: 12179355 / Yahoo: tukkijaetkae / Skype: jarmokorteniemi

--------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Do you believe in astrology? Jupiter exerts less gravitational influence
over a human body than an angry rhino less than two meters away...

In article ,
Big John wrote:

A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

The first one will take at least 4-1/2 hours, the light travel time from
Pluto. It will take about nine months for all of the Pluto data to be
sent back because it will be recorded on-board, and the distance and
available transmitter power will limit the data rate to less than 1000
bits per second.

Big John wrote:
A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

Light-travel time from Pluto in July 2015 will be
31.9 astronomical units X 500 seconds/AU = 15950 seconds = 4.43 hours.
That's once the probe has enough "spare time" not requiring
pointing in a different direction to be transmitting the data.
I don't see a scan platform to allow arbitrary pointing of the
instruments with respect to the spacecraft structure, so (like
Cassini) it will spend most of the flyby with its antenna not
pointed at us. But there's plenty of time afterward to dump all
those bits.

Bill Keel

A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

The time it takes for a signal to get from Pluto to Earth at the time
of the New Horizons encounter is four hours and twenty-five minutes.

Since New Horizons has enormous data storage capacity but *very*
limited data transmission speed at Pluto, it will take nine months
after the encounter to retrieve all the data that the probe has
gathered.

Big John wrote:
A country boy with an interest in space is wondering how long will it
take photos to get back to Earth from "New Horizons", once it arrives in
the Pluto neighborhood? I've read a lot of stuff about the flight, but
haven't seen that.

Pluto is roughly 40x as far from the Sun as Earth; Earth is about 8
minutes at light-speed from the sun. Therefore, radio signals from the
Pluto mission should take about 320 minutes (5 hours, 20 min) to reach
Earth.

Mike Miller