The New Horizons team tweeted Tuesday that the spacecraft was on course for the flyby. The spacecraft will have a relative velocity of 30,800 mph at its approach and will come as close as 17,000 miles to Pluto’s largest moon, Charon.
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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.
The CU-Boulder scientists and students involved in New Horizons are at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Baltimore for the Pluto encounter.
“We’re so far away that we know next to nothing about its geology and geography”, she said.
Analysis of the data coming in from the spacecraft will take years and will inform a potential future mission to set a satellite into orbit around the dwarf planet.
As for “the whale”, it’s a darkened area located along the ex- planet’s equator.
Years ago, the National Academy of Sciences ranked the exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt as the highest priority for solar system exploration. This will give scientists an unprecedented look at the makeup of the small planet, along with its moons, hopefully giving us further insight in how our solar system formed and if there truly can be life on other planets. But Pluto is different: Even though it is out beyond the gas giants, it has a solid, icy surface.
“The probe is small-only the size of a baby grand piano- and was made to be so small so that it could be launched with more force into space to reach Pluto in a reasonable amount of time”, Hamilton said.
Nasa’s New Horizons probe has sent back some of the most detailed pictures of Pluto ever taken.
The probe has always been barreling to the brownie mother earth and also its particular principal celestial body overhead, Charon, taking into consideration that January 2006. Astronomers have since discovered that Pluto resides in a previously unknown region called the Kuiper Belt, with hundreds of thousands of mini-planets and comet-like objects orbiting beyond Neptune.
“Our knowledge of the Pluto system is about to be dramatically revolutionized by New Horizons“, Stern said at the Monday briefing.
“The universe has a lot more variety than we thought about, and that’s wonderful”, Stern said.
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These sorts of discoveries are incredibly exciting for UVA professor Alan Howard who studies the surfaces of planets.
