[rootbear]

I don't know why that article quotes two weeks. I've read the 16 months figure in several places and it was mentioned in the press briefings yesterday. There might be a specific subset of data that will take two weeks to get. Perhaps the low-res JPGs of all of the planet imagery.

[dEnigma]

That article says two weeks because it's talking about a different set of images, from January. The uncompressed images from the fly-by will take the roughly 16 months you mentioned, but there will be smaller, compressed images before that.

[UberMouse]

I think it's 16 months to transfer every piece of sensor and imaging data back. The article says it takes ~40 minutes to transfer back a losslessly compressed full resolution image from the LORRI scanner

[mikeash]

One of the early things I did when I obtained a computer modem was dial into a NASA BBS and download images of planets taken by Voyager. I believe it was at 300bps, although we may have had our 2400bps modem by then.

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.

[firebones]

Anyone got info on the software/hardware specs and how they approach prioritizing and storage management? We waited a long time for the Apollo code to make it to Github--what better way to rope in the interest of one segment of humanity than getting more eyes on the code?

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?

[Dylan16807]

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0624055...

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.

[hga]

they actually upgraded the code in-flight to use both transmitters at once and nearly double the data rate

It was anticipated this would be possible, depending on how the energy budget for the whole craft worked out.