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takyon writes:

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.

Original Submission