Today, New Horizons station will begin to photograph Pluto

The New Horizons space station, which set off from Earth to Pluto on January 19, 2006, today will begin to photograph the planetoid and the surrounding space. Earlier, the device had already come out of hibernation , and headed for rapprochement with the dwarf planet.

The maximum convergence with Pluto will be reached on July 14 of this year. But New Horizons will send photos of Pluto long before that time. It is worth noting that the station's instrumentation includes seven scientific instruments: two infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers, two additional spectrometers, a small color camera and a telescopic camera with high resolution, plus a cosmic dust detector.

The station configuration includes a 32-bit Mongoose processor operating at 12 MHz. This chip is a close relative of the MIPS R3000 chip, which was installed, in particular, in the Sony PlayStation.
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The satellite has 8 GB of flash memory for recording data. The memory block is divided into two parts, and the backup of the images received by the station is written to the second part. The satellite body and all sensitive instruments are protected from radiation. The power source is a thermoelectric generator operating on a plutonium radioisotope.

It is worth noting that the probe will use a very weak communication channel for transmitting data to the home, the bandwidth of which is only 700 bits per second. The time lag during “communication” with the probe is more than 4 hours. According to NASA estimates, scientists will need more than 9 months to upload the entire archive of photos that will be obtained by the probe.