Clipping along at 14 km/second, New Horizons awoke in January to begin observations of Pluto and its primary moon, Charon, located beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt region, which was discovered in 1992. The spacecraft is flying so fast that its trajectory will hardly be altered as it makes its way toward the dwarf planet for its July 14th flyby. “But with New Horizons we will get our first detailed glimpse of the surface”.
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On Pluto’s hemisphere that won’t be facing those close-up cameras, the approach pictures already show a freakish series of four giant, evenly spaced circular black spots, each a few hundred miles wide.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank, writing recently for National Public Radio, calculated the time it would take to drive to Pluto at 65 miles per hour – 6,293 years. Charles Gammie, a University of Illinois professor of astronomy and physics, talked with News Bureau physical sciences editor Liz Ahlberg about Pluto’s close encounter.
Image of Pluto from the New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), July 8, 2015.
Nearing the end of a 9-and-a-half-year journey to the solar system’s unexplored outer reaches, scientists are exited about the new images of Pluto being received by the New Horizons spacecraft.
As for Pluto’s Hill sphere, it’s actually five times larger than Earth’s. Paul Jerram, Chief Engineer of Image Sensors at e2v, commented, LORRI is very similar to the Navcam image sensor we made for the Rosetta mission, which has been producing the majority of the incredible images of comet 67p.
New Horizons leading personal computer plowed, producing a move to its reserve desktop though it eagerly anticipated further directions from areas remotes.
Doctoral student Jamey Szalay, one of two students now on the SDC science team, came to CU-Boulder in 2010 when New Horizons was screaming almost a million miles a day between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus.
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In lieu of sufficient NASA funding, Bray was able to join the mission team thanks in large part to a professional development grant funded by LPL. This closest approach moment will hit at approximately 11:50 UTC. Because the spacecraft’s radio dish is not articulated, New Horizons cannot communicate with Earth while its instruments are trained on Pluto. “That is the day we will storm the gates of the Kuiper Belt”, he said.
