NASA's New Horizons is presently on its lonely journey through deep space, due to which it will be hard at work transmitting a trove of data and pictures from its Pluto encounter back to Earth. Signals are travelling at the speed of light, taking 4.5 hours to travel three billion miles to reach Earth, which means the spacecraft has a huge undertaking ahead of it. Data is downlinking at a rate of nearly one to four kilobits per second, which means the whole trove of science from the July 14 encounter will take a year in transmitting back to Earth.

According to New Horizons' principal investigator, Alan Stern the trove of information returning to Earth in a time span of the next year is going to help scientists attain a better understanding of origin of Pluto and the evolution of the dwarf planet.

In a statement, Stern said, "What's coming is not just the remaining 95 percent of the data that's still aboard the spacecraft - it's the best data sets, the highest-resolution images and spectra, the most important atmospheric data sets, and more. It's a treasure trove".

New Horizons was launched in January 2006 for a three-billion-mile journey to Pluto. It 'phoned home' after its Pluto flyby and indicated that it had successfully navigated only 7,700 miles from the dwarf planet. Later on, it sent back the first high-resolution pictures of Pluto's surface.