Around 10 gigabits worth of information are being sent as we speak right now by the New Horizons spacecraft, the first probe ever to fly by the dwarf planet Pluto.
Transmission of the data began last Sept. 5 and will take about a year to complete. Transmission of the data is being done with the help of NASA's Deep Space Network, using a system of big radio dishes from California, Spain, and Australia.
"This is what we came for — these images, spectra and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado said in a statement.
The probe was launched way back in 2006, a piano-sized probe that is said to run on meager power that would be enough to light up two 100-watt incandescent bulbs. With regards to the slow transmission of data, the probe is only capable of transmitting about one and four kilobytes per second.
Considering that the probe has taken in tens of gigabits of information and the snail's pace of transfer or images and other data at the slow downlink rate, it should not be surprising why it takes quite a long time to download the said data.
The probe is 4.8 billion kilometers away from Earth, giving you an idea of why it takes about 4.5 hours for the signals, which is already traveling at the light of speed, to get here.
Among the images which have already been downloaded include towering ice mountains, geologically young plains, as well as giant canyons on Pluto's largest moon, Charon.
Handlers of the probe will soon be setting it toward a small object called 2014 MU69, which is about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto.
This will become an extended mission for the New Horizons probe, although NASA will have to first approve it. If approved, the probe will make its 2014 MU69 flyby in early 2019.
