openpolitics.com

Little Pluto and Its Big Data

For instance, even though New Horizons got no closer than 7,800 miles from Pluto, and it zoomed past at over 30,000 mph, it collected so much data that NASA estimates that it’ll take fifteen months for it all to downlink back to Earth. Forget prompt analysis – we won’t even have all the data in our hands until October 2016.

.. Incredibly, peak transmission speed is a sluggish 1-2 kilobits per second. To put that into perspective, New Horizons’ highest resolution camera, LORRI (LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager) has a detection square that measures 1024 x 1024 pixels. Each pixel is translated into a 12-bit number – meaning each picture is a 12 million bit package, travelling over billions of miles of space. And that’s just one camera.