Your linked article says 2 weeks, not 16 months.
11 photos a day.
11 photos a day.
I imagine that there wasn't time or power to do patches...but if there was, even the mechanics of that would be fascinating.
Has anyone ran across a good discussion around the computational aspects of New Horizons?
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0130080...
Some basic info on communication. The wikipedia page has a lot of info.
The most important parts are that it has a redundant pair of 8GB flash drives and they actually upgraded the code in-flight to use both transmitters at once and nearly double the data rate.
I'm not sure how priorities are arranged but it's all going to be sent back relatively quickly in terms of mission lifetime, and I think they managed storage use mostly by putting in plenty.
It was anticipated this would be possible, depending on how the energy budget for the whole craft worked out.
Fortunately I didn't spend 16 months at it, since we were paying long distance charges and just a couple of pictures of Neptune downloaded over the course of an hour or so cost a relatively ridiculous amount of money.
Still, it makes me feel a kinship with these folks, even if just barely.