Pluto is said to be the NASA’s last stop in exploring every planet in the solar system.
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In particular, scientists have been fascinated with the size and spacing of the spots, which face Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, and are understood to be linked to a dark belt circling its equatorial region.
New Horizons is the first mission to the Kuiper Belt, a very big zone of icy bodies and mysterious small objects orbiting beyond Neptune. That fascination led him to a job at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he discovered Pluto in 1930 at the age of 24.
“To work on this mission you have to really be into delayed gratification”, he added.
“It’s best not to take any chances if you don’t need to”, said Mr. Fountain during a news briefing at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, mission control for New Horizons.
As New Horizons hurtles toward its closest approach to Pluto, to take place on Tuesday, NASA released a new image of the dwarf planet on Saturday.
Pluto from a few million miles away. About 60 miles across, the moon has bright spots from material blasted out of one of its crater; this suggests that Charon formed relatively recently in geologic terms. Even after the spacecraft whizzes by, the data and pictures will keep coming in for another 16 months, Stern told National Public Radio’s Science Friday. “We’re going to turn Pluto into a real world with complexity and diversity”.
A shot of Pluto’s moon Charon shows apparent impact craters, chasms and a puzzling dark region near the moon’s north pole. “When he looked at Pluto, it was just a speck of light”.
New Horizons’ is set to make history tomorrow morning.
“The flyby will be 7:49 a.m. EST on Tuesday and the downloads will start that evening”. This is possible on July 14, when New Horizons would gather as much scientific information as possible on the icy planet and its five known moons. Speeding along at 30,800 miles per hour New Horizons will pierce the Pluto system like a smartly aimed arrow. But on Pluto, temperatures as low as nearly minus 400 degrees make all water solid. “The science team is just drooling over these pictures”.
“I’m ecstatic”, said Stephen Gwyn, a data specialist with the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre in Victoria, part of the National Research Council, and the creator of a customized star catalogue that is helping guide New Horizons toward its historic rendezvous.
These approaches also will be used to see if Charon has an atmosphere. No one had any idea what it looked like.
The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter is about the size of a cake pan, according to NASA, and assesses space-dust particles that hit New Horizons. It is the fastest manmade object ever to leave earth, travelling at ten times the speed of a bullet (or over one million miles a day).
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In the meantime, here’s the recent Nasa documentary, The Year of Pluto: New Horizons. Any attempt to communicate with Earth during the flyby’s most critical period would mean pulling the instruments off their targets.
