Australian scientists are taking part in the historic New Horizons Pluto mission, with a Canberra space centre acting as "telephone exchange" for images and data being beamed back from the distant planet.
NASA's New Horizons satellite is preparing to re establish contact with home from some 5.3 billion kilometres away, the start of a 16 month effort to beam back 10 years worth of cached data.
Canberra's Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla has played an important role in the mission, last night beaming a high-powered transmission to Pluto timed to arrive precisely 4.5 hours later, the exact moment New Horizons was passing behind Pluto from Earth's point of view.
"(The signal) passed through Pluto's atmosphere at the precise moment New Horizons was passing behind Pluto, so the space craft's instruments could receive the signal," DSCC spokesman Glen Nagle told AAP.
The data will help scientists answer various questions, particularly about the composition, density and temperature of Pluto's atmosphere.
"After the phone home signal (Wednesday AEST), the space craft will start to send back some of the high priority images and high resolution images of the surface of Pluto," Mr Nagle said.
"They will be received here."
The "phone home" signal was due to start about 11am Wednesday, Sydney time.
Each image will take about 40 minutes to beam back at about 1kb per second.
New Horizons has a 12 hour window to take close-up pictures.
The Tidbinbilla complex will again relay those images back to the US.
The pictures are expected to be highly detailed, providing a glimpse of the never-before-seen surface terrain.
"Some of the cameras on the space craft will be returning images down to 60 metres per pixel resolution."
This means a resolution of 1:60,000 - good enough to see several suburban houses.
"Not that we'll find suburban houses. It'd be a good discovery, maybe for first home buyers," Mr Nagle quipped.
The DSCC receives commands from mission control at John Hopkins University in Maryland, and relays all of those commands to New Horizons.
The New Horizon space craft is the fastest ever launched, and is hurtling through Pluto's system at more than 30,000 miles per hour.
A collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft, NASA says.
But Mr Nagle said it may be possible to keep receiving data from New Horizon's over the next 30 years, although it might not all come from Pluto.
"There is some discussion about an extended mission to head out to the Kuiper belt, a region beyond Pluto with tens of thousands of objects," he said.
"We could still be having contact with the New Horizons for 30 years from now, and it could still be telling us
new and incredible things about that region from beyond the planets."
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