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NASA's New Horizons probe has completed the transfer of data from the Pluto-Charon flyby after around 15 months of transmissions. The data will be vetted before NASA sends the command to erase the probe's storage:
Having traveled from the New Horizons spacecraft over 3.1 billion miles (five hours, eight minutes at light speed), the final item – a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager – arrived at mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25. The downlink came via NASA's Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.
[...] Because it had only one shot at its target, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could – taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015. "We have our pot of gold," said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of APL.
The New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM) will involve a flyby of the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. The object is estimated to have a diameter of 30-45 km.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Tuesday November 01 2016, @02:41PM
If the AI worked perfectly, every image should be less interesting than the one that came before. This is anti-climactic, but makes sense given that the probe may stop functioning at any time. I'm really excited if AI that old was able to make reasonable decisions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @03:48PM
It didn't say anything about AI prioritizing returns. The observations were pre-programmed by people, so they probably ranked them by estimated importance ahead of time and gave a priority attribute to each observation. The probe would return the data in the order of that priority attribute. For example, if two observations are partially redundant, such as the same area at slightly diff angles, then only one may get a high ranking.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Tuesday November 01 2016, @07:54PM
You're correct, I inverted the order of "select" and "send" in
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday November 01 2016, @04:22PM
The main problem with that is the definition of the word "interesting".
We just went from Pluto being a few hundred bright pixels on a dark background to seeing it has sharp mountains. Hard to plan 10 years ahead whether picture n+1 will show the Alien human-clone factory, a steam geyser, or just the same flat featureless plain...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 01 2016, @04:57PM
We just went from Pluto being a few hundred bright pixels on a dark background to seeing it has sharp mountains. Hard to plan 10 years ahead whether picture n+1 will show the Alien human-clone factory, a steam geyser, or just the same flat featureless plain...
They seemed to have it figured out. Hard problems are just hard.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fishybell on Tuesday November 01 2016, @05:40PM
You're right. They did a great job hiding the Alien human-clone factory.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 01 2016, @10:00PM