https://www.amazon.com/Uplink-Downlink-History-Space-Network...
Fascinating stuff. I wonder how they will manage the priority of getting that data back over the next two years? Timeshareing on the DSN has been a problem since the early 60’s.
The probe has limited data storage capacity and even more limited bandwidth to send it back to earth.
I’m guessing they have a protocol to prioritize data from different instruments as well as prioritize data purging if there is an opportunity to look at something more interesting before everything could be sent back home.
It can be a heartbreaking process for some of the teams for sure.
My best bet is that they get some initial indication of what data was collected then prioritize based on what they think is the most interesting or valuable from what was collected.
They were still retrieving data form the original Pluto flyby as this one was planned I’m not sure if they even got all the data from pluto yet.
This is not a risk as, with high probability, there is nothing else on their trajectory they will be able to look at for the 18-month downlink time.
> I’m not sure if they even got all the data from pluto yet.
They did. It's true that they have limited data storage space, but they have had plenty of time to download the entire data set from Pluto.
https://futurism.com/it-took-15-months-but-all-of-new-horizo...
I believe the major constraint is how much data they can take during the short flyby time, not storage space or downlink time.
It’s still astonishing to me that they can get 1kbp/s with s 1.5m dish antenna pointed at a target 0.29281 arc minutes in size.
This is the equivalent of pissing into your toilet form orbit.
But heck now the FCC can claim that broadband coverage has been expanded up to the Kuiper Belt.
It is, in a very broad sense, the same problem we have at the LHC. There is just too much data taken for the available storage and bandwidth.
I suspect if a new nearby target were discovered, they may have to send back just thumbnails and summarized/compressed data, review the summaries back on Earth, and only request the more promising full images and data snippets.
I just hope they already have such compression/summarizing software onboard because sending significant new software that far can be a bear. I wonder if they planned for such a "rush job" scenario?
And remember, the summarized versions are used to narrow down the set of full data sets returned. Thus, if something looks unusual in the summaries, the full set of that segment is requested from the probe. If there is a need to rush, it's a matter of narrowing down which parts of the data you want to send back in full.
Also even if it didn’t need to be spun the instruments would be turned off to save power, the probe has no instruments that could detect any objects without a preplanned flyby.
After passing a target, there's boatloads of data to send back. If a new target means there's not enough time to download it ALL before storage is needed for the new target, then decisions have to be made about what to fully send back and what to skip and/or only send summarized/compressed versions of. This has very little to do with instrument activation; it's a "between targets" process.