Category Archives: Pluto

astronomy, New Horizons mission, Pluto

“It Just Gets More Exciting from Here!”

Leave a comment

Possible Pluto Features Sighted

The news from the New Horizons mission just keeps getting better. The latest images, combined into an animation, show what might be a polar cap on the dwarf planet. It’s the best picture yet of this distant, tiny world. The good news is, as the spacecraft gets closer, the images are just going to get better!

 

The 3x-magnified view of Pluto highlights the changing brightness across the disk of Pluto as it rotates. Because Pluto is tipped on its side (like Uranus), when observing Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft, one primarily sees one pole of Pluto, which appears to be brighter than the rest of the disk in all the images. Scientists suggest this brightening in Pluto’s polar region might be caused by a “cap” of highly reflective snow on the surface. The “snow” in this case is likely to be frozen molecular nitrogen ice. New Horizons observations in July will determine definitively whether or not this hypothesis is correct. In addition to the polar cap, these images reveal changing brightness patterns from place to place as Pluto rotates, presumably caused by large-scale dark and bright patches at different longitudes on Pluto’s surface. In all of these images, a mathematical technique called “deconvolution” is used to improve the resolution of the raw LORRI images, restoring nearly the full resolution allowed by the camera’s optics and detector. Courtesy: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

You might wonder how a spacecraft traveling at 14.57 kilometers per second (relative to the Sun), now more than 31.86 astronomical units (that’s nearly 32 times the distance between Earth and the Sun), can send back increasingly better images? It starts with a camera called LORRI, which stands for Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. It’s a small, but powerful instrument, weighing less than 20 pounds and using up less than six watts of electricity. The “guts” of the instrument is a 8.2-inch telescope aperture that focuses visible light onto a CCD. Think of it as a digital camera attached to a telescope. It’s quite small, but powerful and is built to withstand the cold, radiation-filled vacuum of interplanetary space. All of its data are collected on board, and then sent back to Earth via an X-band communications system that includes several antennas.  They communicate with the Deep Space Network, which then relays the data to the waiting team members. You can actually see when New Horizons is communicating with Earth at DSN Now.

As New Horizons gets closer to Pluto, its images will improve dramatically. Already, it has shown us that Pluto is a world with surface features. Now, we just have to wait to see what those features are. Starting in mid-May, the images will start to be better than Hubble quality resolution, and that’s when things will really start to get exciting. At flyby, LORRI will be providing looks at the surface that will resolve features only 50 meters (about 150 feet) across. That means we’ll be able to see things such as craters, cliffs, chasms, whatever it is that is making Pluto’s surface look alternately bright, dark, and interesting.

I was listening to the New Horizons team talk about these latest images via telecon yesterday and could really hear the excitement in their voices. My friend Alan Stern (the PI for the mission) whom I’ve been talking with quite a bit in these last few months’ run-up to the flyby, summarized the situation for all the listeners. “After traveling more than nine years through space, it’s stunning to see Pluto, literally a dot of light as seen from Earth, becoming a real place right before our eyes,” he said Alan Stern. “These incredible images are the first in which we can begin to see detail on Pluto, and they are already showing us that Pluto has a complex surface.”

At closest approach, the spacecraft will be about 12,500 kilometers above the surface of Pluto, and that will really give LORRI and the other New Horizons instruments something to show us. So, stay tuned, as they say.

Pluto huggers everywhere: our time is coming!

 

New Horizons mission, Pluto

Turning Points of Light into Planets

Leave a comment

New Horizons Explores the “Third Zone” of the Solar System

Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft RALPH color imager. The spacecraft was about 71 million miles from the pair when this was taken. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

A tiny spacecraft with seven powerful instruments is hurrying to Pluto, on its way to return images of a planet that we have only ever seen as a dot in the distance orbiting the Sun in a previously unexplored zone of the solar system. New Horizons will fly by Pluto on July 14, 2015, visiting the last of the known “planets” in our solar system. The last flyby like this, where a spacecraft encountered a previously unexplored world, was made by the Voyager 2 mission when it swept past Neptune in 1989.

“About half the people on our planet have never seen a flyby like this,” said New Horizons PI Alan Stern during today’s NASA press conference about the mission. “This is really unique and historic. I know it sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Three months from today, we will make the first exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, which is farther than any shore ever explored by humankind. We will all get to watch as a point of light turns into a planet in a matter of weeks.”

New Horizons started out as a Pluto fast flyby, with a great deal of planning at NASA over a period of a decade before it was built and launched. It may sound like hyperbole, but this mission is going to change our view of the solar system yet again, just as the Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini missions did before it. All but Cassini were flybys, the first tentative “pokes” at new worlds.  This mission  is also a flyby, giving us the first up-close look at a distant world. But, its significance is even bigger than that.  New Horizons is probing what planetary scientists now think of as the “third zone” of the solar system.  And, that’s a big change from the way we’ve always understood our Sun and planets.

Continue reading Turning Points of Light into Planets →