NASA has released a map of Pluto’s surface made from images recently taken by the New Horizons probe and it includes some quite mysterious features. Dr. Will says this mission is of significance because it is too small to see with even the most powerful magnification and therefore nothing has ever been documented. After nearly a decade of speeding through space to get to Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft is gonna keep zipping right on past it. “New Horizons will certainly be momentarily not relaxed enough to acquire technology records in that event”. “To learn more about it, up-close data is crucial and this is our first chance”, she said.
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Also on board New Horizons is the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI), which will study material such as nitrogen and carbon monoxide that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and is then ionized by ultraviolet light from the Sunday.
“I’m thrilled to be a be a part of this mission”, he said.
As for “the whale”, it’s a darkened area located along the ex- planet’s equator. A small electronic box inside the spacecraft functions as the instrument’s “brain” to assess each individual dust particle that strikes the detector.
Every known planet in our solar system has been examined by NASA, but Pluto remains a mystery.
CU-Boulder Professor Fran Bagenal, a mission co-investigator, leads the New Horizons Particles and Plasma Team.
[New Horizons computer overload won’t hurt the mission to Pluto, NASA says].
Years ago, the National Academy of Sciences ranked the exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt as the highest priority for solar system exploration. In Pluto’s case, it crosses the orbit of Neptune and if they ever collided, Neptune wouldn’t care, and Pluto wouldn’t be around anymore. But only the worldwide Astronomical Union has the authority to label celestial objects and Pluto remains technically a dwarf moon.
“Technically, Pluto is a “dwarf planet””, she said.
Verbiscer and Howard will join a multitude of other scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to be on hand Tuesday’s flyby. APL designed, built and operates the mission and manages it for NASA. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was used to take the above image of Pluto on 7 July, when the spacecraft was 8,000,000 km from the dwarf planet.
“We did hit a speed bump”, Stern said.
As we have seen with recent exploration on Mars, there are surprises and questions that arise when a camera is free to explore a planet’s surface.
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“The universe has a lot more variety than we thought about, and that’s wonderful”, Stern said.
