An animated gif “movie” of Pluto and Charon in motion. This was taken by the New Horizons mission at distance of some 429 to 422 million kilometers (267-262 miles) away. The spacecraft is set to arrive at the Pluto system July 2015.
The New Horizons mission to the outer solar system scored a big one this week with the release of a set of images that clearly — and I DO mean clearly — show Pluto with its largest companion Charon in motion. This is an amazing shot from a huge distance, and the fact that we can “see” the orbital motion of these two places makes them seem somehow more real now. The New Horizons mission has been on the way to Pluto (and beyond) since 2006, with a main goal of imaging and studying the Pluto system, and then sweeping out to see what else it can find in the Kuiper Belt.
I really like what this mission is going to do. Not only is it opening up a dwarf planet for exploration, but it’s going to tell us an incredible amount of cool stuff about the tremendously cold and frigid worlds that exist “out there”. Pluto is on the doorstep of a place in the solar system that likely contains many more worlds of its size and possibly bigger! This region is a storehouse of materials that exist in pretty much the same chemical state they were in when they formed in the early epochs of solar system history.
Many years ago the two Voyager spacecraft left on their missions to the outer planets and beyond. Each carries a golden record that contains digitized version of the sounds and images of Earth. It was and is an inspiring idea and one that tickles the imagination of anyone enamored of space exploration. The Voyagers, both on their way out of the solar system (one has, in fact entered interstellar space already), now bear a record of our time on Earth for anyone to find and interpret.
However, the Voyagers aren’t the only ones headed out. The Pioneer spacecraft are on their endless journey, and the New Horizons mission is on its way to Pluto and beyond. None of them carry any golden records, and artist Jon Lomberg has set out to correct that oversight for the New Horizons mission, which will pass by Pluto in July 2015. He has started the New Horizons Message Initiative, a petition to have an electronic message placed aboard the spacecraft. As Jon states on the project page, the form and content are still TBD, but would likely be images and some sounds.
The poster for the New Horizons Message Initiative
Jon is a space artist; you may have seen much of his work in the original Cosmos series with Carl Sagan. He was the design director for the original Voyager golden record. He also designed and worked on the amazing Galaxy Garden on the Big Island of Hawai’i that I wrote about some months ago.
The New Horizons Message Initiative has a stellar board of advisors, and they are now gathering signatures to petition NASA to allow the design of some kind of message to transmit to New Horizons. Once NASA has approved, then a Kickstarter campaign will begin to raise money to work up the message and develop the techniques of storing the message aboard the spacecraft. In addition, the group plans an educational outreach component to excite people’s imaginations about the concept of sending a new message out to the universe.
Like the idea? Many other people do, including the Principal Investigator for New Horizons and an old friend, Dr. Alan Stern. Join him, me and such folks as actor Levar Burton in support of sending a message from Earth to the cosmos. Check out the Web page and sign the petition. I did—what’s not to like about letting the cosmos know we are here?
