New Horizons

[mike carey]

I saw this in a tweet today and I think it sums things up: '4 October 1957-14 July 2015. In future this will be known as the First Age of Space Exploration. All 9 planets (1 a former planet) visited.'

 

The previous planetary exploration missions have all captured my imagination, be it Jupiter's ice moon Europa or the methane geysers on Titan. Now the amazing images of Pluto.

 

For those of us with slow internet, consider this. The data rate from New Horizon is such that the data it has just collected will take 16 months - SIXTEEN MONTHS - to transmit back to Earth.

 

Now for the blow my own - or our own - trumpet department. The Canberra Deep Space Communictions Centre (more commonly known as Tidbinbilla) has been part of NASA's communications network for decades, and was part of the communications link for Apollo 11. The first images from the Pluto fly-by were received at Tidbinbilla so images of the huge receiving dish in the mid-winter fog of our coldest day of the year so far figured on tonight's news bulletins.