Category Archives: New Horizons mission

dwarf planet, New Horizons mission, Pluto

The View to Pluto is Improving

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A Point of Light Becomes a World

Images of Pluto a month apart. The April images are shown on the left, with the May images on the right. All have been rotated to align Pluto’s rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down), as depicted schematically in the center panel. Between April and May, Pluto appears to get larger as the spacecraft gets closer, with Pluto’s apparent size increasing by approximately 50 percent. Pluto rotates around its axis every 6.4 Earth days, and these images show the variations in Pluto’s surface features during its rotation. Courtesy NASA/APL

Things are really heating up for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto. Team members are converging on the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland (the control center for the mission), and they’re already studying fascinating science and images flowing back to us from across the solar system. Pluto is getting more and more real all the time!

The last time I was this excited about seeing a distant world was during the Voyager missions, which visited the outer solar system gas giants and gave us the first very high-resolution images of those worlds. Now, it’s Pluto’s turn, and the view just keeps getting better. Take a look at these two images from just the last couple of months.

The latest one, taken May 12, 2015, from a distance of 46.6 million miles, shows some distinct differences in brightness across the surface. My friend Alan Stern (who is the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission) explained that they show some kind of complex surface geology, or at least some variations of what’s on the surface in different places. “These images also continue to support the hypothesis that Pluto has a polar cap whose extent varies with longitude,” he said, pointing out that his science team will be able to definitely figure out the composition of the icy materials in the polar caps in July. That’s when the spacecraft and its spectrometers will get their chance to analyze the surface.

As the spacecraft gets closer, we should really start to get some startling views. In just a few weeks, late June, the images will have four times more resolution than the images we’re seeing here. That will improve until close approach, when the images will be an astounding 5,000 times the resolution. With that kind of clarity, I really hope we’ll be able to see some pretty decent details of the surface — perhaps craters, cliffs (if they exist), and cracks in the surface. As I stare at the May 12 image, I can begin to imagine the surface of this distant dwarf planet. And, I can see (in my mind’s eye) big grins on the imaging team’s faces as they pore over the view.

It has to be incredibly exciting for the New Horizons team — a journey of well more than 10 years (when you count the development time for the mission, PLUS the trip time from Earth to Pluto) — is about to culminate in the discoveries of a lifetime. And, they’re discoveries we can all follow along and enjoy. Stay tuned!

dwarf planet, Kuiper Belt, New Horizons mission, Pluto

Pluto: Days of Discovery Draw Nearer

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New Horizons Explores the Bones of the Outer Solar System

An artist’s concept of a Kuiper Belt object. There could be three or four times the number of dwarf planets in the solar system than there are “real” planets. Some may look like this. Courtesy NASA/G. Bacon (STScI).

In just about six weeks, the New Horizons spacecraft will begin its close flyby of Pluto, Charon and three (or more) other moons in this distant system. That mission will change our perspective on the solar system in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.

Why do I say that? Well, let’s look at how we define the objects in our solar system. It’s a moveable feast of planets, moons, rings, asteroids, comets, and now dwarf planets.

The discovery of Pluto was a big thing, with people acting like we’d finally found the “edge” of the solar system. Well, that’s not exactly true. In the years since Clyde Tombaugh found this little world, the existence of Pluto has fostered a lot of thought about how we define worlds and other objects that orbit stars. The 2006 decision to reclassify it as a dwarf planet is just a change of name, nothing more. It doesn’t change what Pluto is, and more importantly, it doesn’t affect what Pluto is telling us (and will tell us) about the solar system.

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