NASA’s New Horizons probe, which made its flyby of Pulto on July 14 and gathered information on the planet and its moons, began its downlink phase on Saturday. The spacecraft contacted mission control following its flyby of Pluto, indicating it successfully had navigated only 7,700 miles from Pluto. Later on, it sent back the first high-resolution pictures of Pluto’s surface.

The mission team is beginning an intensive downlinking of the tens of gigabits of data that the spacecraft collected and stored on its digital recorders.

“This is what we came for – these images, spectra, and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time”, said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. The spacecraft has an enormous undertaking ahead of it as while travelling at the speed of light, signals take 4.5 hours in travelling three billion miles to reach Earth. Following the completion of the data transmission, NASA is also considering an extended mission, wherein the space probe would head farther into the Kuiper Belt – at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit, according to NASA.

What is coming is not only the remaining 95% of its data, still aboard New Horizons, it’s the best sets of data, the images with the highest resolution and spectra, the atmospheric data that is the most important and more. “It’s a treasure trove”. In fact, with New Horizons past Pluto, the typical downlink rate is about 1 to 4 kilobits per second.

Greg Rienzi, of the HUB news center at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in July that it would take about 16 months for scientists to gather the bulk of the information sent back from New Horizons.

The images that New Horizons has already beamed home revealed towering ice mountains and vast, geologically young plains on Pluto, as well as giant canyons on the dwarf planet’s largest moon, Charon.

Apart from the huge distance between Earth and Pluto, the body-mounted instrumentation pattern of the New Horizons spacecraft causes for delay in gathering and transmitting data to Earth. Mission team members therefore have high hopes about the probe’s complete flyby data set.