Inside New Horizons: What It’s Like to Conduct a 9-Year Mission for a 3-Minute Flyby

After nine years of travel and little public attention, a spacecraft the size of a piano sped by Pluto and is in the process of returning photos about 4.5 billion kilometers back to Earth. The remote exploration and operation of the New Horizons spacecraft requires patience and meticulous training: “The scientists had spent a decade patiently guiding the probe 3 billion miles to Pluto, but as their work culminated in less than three minutes of flyby, they had absolutely no way of knowing how the probe was doing,” writes Joseph Stromberg for Vox. “The spacecraft is literally expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, but it's doing so with decade-old technology and along a route calculated years ago.” New Horizons was about 200 million kilometers away from Pluto for capturing images. Each photo sent by the spacecraft’s 1990s modem takes 4.5 hours to return to Earth. It will be another 16 months before New Horizons returns all data on surface composition, temperatures, atmosphere and other analysis. – YaleGlobal