[X] My Assistant

[just-nick]

This is primarily a question for Alan et. all., but I thought it might spark some interesting about prioritizing science during a fast memory and time limited flyby. I'm also trying to get an idea of what to look forward to -- in nine years -- from Pluto. Don't want to be disappointed!

Alan has mentioned a couple of times that Pluto data collection is essentially memory limited. During the close encounter there just isn't time to dump data to Earth to make room for more. So that seems to say that the two constraints on collecting info are how much you can store and how long you have to gather it.

I've also noticed that some of the old NH materials describe 16 Gbit recorders while the latest information says 64 Gbit. That's quite a difference -- a factor of four. The only documentation I've seen about the expected data return, the archive and management plan pdf, implies about 11 Gbit of raw data to be returned. This makes complete sense with the older recorder specification with a nice healthy 50% margin for recorder degredation, engineering data, etc.

But has the expected data collection increased any now that the the recorder has quadrupled in size? Are you now limited by time during the encounter? Are you now limited by DSN time for download? Are you planning to, like Cassini with the Huygens descent, write the data repeatedly within each recorder for extra-super-redundancy? Are you expecting more radiation damage so that EOL capacity dramatically reduced?

So that's about a dozen questions, I guess.

Answers? Speculations? Related thoughts on how to schedule and prioritize observations?