You need pretty large antennas to send data over billions of miles - and fortunately, NASA has them. The New Horizons mission operations team communicates with the spacecraft through NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) of antenna stations. The DSN consists of facilities in California's Mojave Desert; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. These stations are spaced about 120 degrees apart on the globe - making sure any spacecraft can be observed constantly as Earth rotates. Visit the DSN Web site for more information.

Sending Commands to the Spacecraft

All commands sent to the New Horizons spacecraft must first pass a rigorous development and review process to ensure the safety of the spacecraft. The mission operations team will work closely with the instrument, science and spacecraft teams to develop the commands that will perform New Horizons' activities. After the command sequences are tested on the ground, the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will send them to the DSN, which is operated and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

New Horizons Mission Operations Center

Data received on Earth through the Deep Space Network will be sent to the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at APL, where data will be "unpacked" and stored. The mission operations and instrument teams will scour the engineering data for performance trend information, while science data will be copied to the Science Operations Center at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. At the Science Ops Center, data will pass through "pipeline" software that converts the data from instrumental units to scientific units, based on calibration data obtained for each instrument. Both the raw and calibrated data files will be formatted for New Horizons science team members to analyze. Within nine months of receipt, both the raw and calibrated data, along with various ancillary files (such as documents describing the pipeline process or the instruments) will be archived for use by the general scientific community at the Small Bodies Node of NASA's Planetary Data System.