At exactly 7:49 am ET on Tuesday, the unmanned spacecraft will fly within 7,750 miles of Pluto, taking high-resolution photos of its surface and collecting all sorts of scientific data.
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The $720-million, don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it mission is traveling right down the line after a final course adjustment June 29.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is the first probe sent to Pluto, and it’s scheduled to arrive in July 2015.
Pluto from a few million miles away. The researcher passed away in 1997, at the age of 90, and so did not get to witness the New Horizons probe embark on its epic journey to the orb he had discovered.
When a NASA probe whizzes past Pluto on Tuesday, the man who discovered the dwarf planet 85 years ago will be there.
It will be Wednesday before the closest of Pluto’s close-ups are available for release.
In order to keep an eye on New Horizons and Pluto, keep track of the New Horizons Facebook page here.
Beamed back on Saturday, the image revealing the dark patches represents “the last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto’s far side for decades to come”, noted Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and the mission’s lead scientist, in a statement over the weekend.
“It (Pluto) was kind of going to the oddball – the planet that didn’t really fit the rest of the planets”. So how do space scientists cope with using old technology to make new discoveries and how will it affect the science they can do?
After the Pluto flyby, New Horizons will continue onwards to the outer vestiges of the Solar System, hopefully visiting some Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) on the way. Back then we hadn’t yet been to the moon and we were only getting our first shadowy glimpse of the planet closest to Earth.
Unfortunately it is this unbelievable speed that means the spacecraft will be unable to land on the planet itself, but will have to gather the photographs, measurements and data during a two hour window as it passes within 8000 miles of the surface, before going on to explore further out into space. It’s expected to collect 5,000 times as much data, for instance, as Mariner 4.
Pluto and Charon are gravitationally locked with an orbital period of 6.4 days, so they always show the same face to one another. REX, the Radio Science Experiment, will measure the atmospheric pressure and ionosphere density of Pluto, while also checking for any atmosphere that Charon may possess. It’s questionable whether it would ever have been called a planet in the first place, if its classification hadn’t been decided ahead of time by the Planet X moniker, and its mass so-overestimated. There’s also LORRI, which is intended for more distant observations and was used for numerous Pluto pictures you probably saw in the lead-up to the historic flyby. No one had any idea what it looked like.
Developed specifically for the New Horizons mission the app shows visualisations of the trajectory data.
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Bill McKinnon, a New Horizons team member from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, expects to see craters and possible volcanic remnants.
