New Horizons: How the Space Probe Phones Home From 3 Billion Miles Away

— -- From three billion miles away, it's the ultimate long-distance phone call.

New Horizons will spend the next 16 months transmitting data back to Earth from its recent encounter with Pluto -- with the information being categorized by low, medium and high priority. It will likely make its last transmission in October or November of next year, officials said.

Sending the trove of data to Earth is a task requiring plenty of patience. It takes 4.5 hours for the radio signal traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth.

The signals are then picked up by NASA's Deep Space Network where the slow downlinking process begins.

"At the datarate we have (2 kilobits per second) it takes over 2 hours to downlink a standard picture from your cell phone!" Curt Niebur, a New Horizons team member, wrote during a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" interview. "That means we will spend the next 16 months transmitting all the data down to Earth."

On Friday, NASA revealed its first exciting photo and data, showing a craterless plain, believed to be less than 100 million years old, is located north of Pluto's icy mountain range and in the center-left of its now infamous heart-shaped feature.

The area, named Sputnik Planum, looks similar to frozen mud cracks on Earth and has various areas that are irregularly shaped while other parts include dark streaks several miles long. It's believed the area is still being shaped by geologic processes.

The finding is just the start of years of discoveries to come about the dwarf planet. NASA said New Horizons is now two million miles on the night side of Pluto and is busy taking a look back at the planet and gathering more information.

Beside transferring data, the spacecraft will now head deeper into the Kuiper Belt, an area beyond Pluto's orbit of the Sun that is the largest structure in the planetary system, with more than 100,000 miniature worlds ripe for exploration, according to NASA.

After the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons would then have the chance to go further, according to Stern, "to explore the deep reaches of the heliosphere," an area extending far beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Launched in January 2006 on a 3 billion mile journey to Pluto, New Horizons "phoned home" on Tuesday night, indicating that it had successfully navigated just 7,700 miles from the dwarf planet Tuesday morning. It later sent back the first high-resolution images of Pluto's surface.