Spacecraft is confirmed healthy, so the next 72 hours should see images that image bested again by 10x. News conference @ 3pm EDT tomorrow (or today for you cross ponders) is suppose to have the first few bits of goodies (aka 'the New York Times package')
Amazing that this was all calculated over 10 years ago and they nailed it. Looking forward to the next images!
STILL ALIVE! This was a triumph! I'm making a note here: Huge success! It's hard to overstate my satisfaction...
Two incredibly exciting years in space - Rosetta/Philae last year and New Horizons this year! Apparently it'll take about a year to get all the high-res data off NH and back to earth due to the atrocious downlink speeds...
Compressed dataset, will be shown at a press conference at 8pm BST. UNcompressed dataset will take until Nov2016 to get home because 1-4kbps connection, variation in speed depends on elevation of New Horizons probe when seen from NASA's Deep Space Network. The nearer the horizon, the slower the connection.
I can't believe I had forgotten about this. My name is now officially past the the inner solar system! Next stop, the heliopause. New Horizons may no longer be functional by that point, but who cares, my name is in space (again).
Now THAT's close! Does the New Horizons team want to pull the craft over for a bit and check the paintwork for scratches?
That's absolutely fantastic, I bet the planetary geologist types are messing their panties right now! Isn't technology awesome?
Globally. Awesome indeed. The best part is that there's still so much more to come, both from NH and from planetary geologist types (yeah, I went there)
and that's the compressed data/images? You can probably count the hairs on ET's arse on the uncompressed versions [when they eventually arrive]... EDIT - still a bit mental that we can do this, yet we still know [comparatively] bugger all about Earth's oceans...
