Why does it take so long to transmit an image from New Horizons to Earth?
Clash Royale CLAN TAG #URR8PPP 47 6 $begingroup$ I just got the news that the New Horizons space probe has passed by some remote planet on the edge of the solar system. I was surprised that the guy from NASA says that it might take 24 months from us to get the photo of that planet. The solar system is not that big, right? It is slow because the signal transmission is slow, right? But why is the transmission so slow? solar-system data-analysis nasa share | improve this question edited Jan 7 at 2:11 astrosnapper 2,442 5 21 asked Jan 2 at 2:31 S. Kohn S. Kohn 399 1 3 5 $endgroup$ 9 $begingroup$ The question refers to "the photo", as if there is only one. New Horizons captured many images during the brief flyby, and also captured a good amount of non-imagery data as well. Per multiple articles, New Horizons should have capture 900 about high resolution images, with about 50 gigabits of data captured in total.