The New Horizons probe will search for signs of an atmosphere and clouds on Pluto, as depicted in this artist’s conception. The probe’s final course was set on Friday. Illustration by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Having determined no last-minute course corrections are needed to avoid debris, the New Horizons team has radioed the flight plan to the spacecraft in advance of its close flyby of Pluto on July 14.
“IT’S HAPPENING! IT’S HAPPENING!” was the message scrawled across the New Horizons’ Facebook page at around 9 am EDT on Friday. “The command load (flight plan) for close flyby has been sent to New Horizons this morning! The load is racing to New horizons at the speed of light is now about at the orbit of Uranus.”
The New Horizons spacecraft is about the size of a baby grand piano and carries a suite of seven instruments, including optical cameras, spectrometers, dust impact counters, plasma particle detectors, and radio equipment. The main camera is called the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI.
“It’s very detailed imagery at closest approach,” New Horizons’ Principal Investigator Alan Stern said. “LORRI will allow us to map the surface of Pluto well enough that if we flew over New York City at the same altitude and looked down with LORRI, we could count the ponds in Central Park and the wharfs on the Hudson.”
Even traveling at the speed of light, it takes about four and a half hours for signals to travel the 3 billion miles between the spacecraft and Earth.
The transmission of the flight plan caps weeks of hazard assessments in which team members scoured images and other data gathered by the New Horizons probe to determine if any previously-unspotted moons, dust clouds or other rocky debris could pose a threat to the spacecraft as it zooms thorough the Pluto system at 31,000 miles per hour.
New color images from the New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced. Each of the spots is about 300 miles in diameter, with a surface area that’s roughly the size of the state of Missouri. Photo by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Traveling at that speed, the spacecraft will only spend about 12 hours in close proximity to Pluto and its five known moons. While it has been transmitting a steady stream of data during its approach, New Horizons is programmed to spend all its time and energy collecting images and other scientific data while it sails in the immediate vicinity of Pluto. The spacecraft will only start sending that close flyby data back once it is past Pluto.
“We decided early on that as the spacecraft flies by Pluto, the mission’s objective should be to acquire as much scientific material as we possibly can,” New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver said. “That means that we can’t have the antenna simultaneously pointing back to the earth, beaming back the data.”
Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, will be prime targets for New Horizons; though the other moons – Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos – will get their fair share of observation time as well.
Until now, scientists have not had access to much high-resolution data about Pluto – even images from the Hubble Space Telescope show it as a pixelated blob.
The first movie created by New Horizons reveals color surface features of Pluto and its largest moon Charon. The movie comprises six high-resolution black-and-white images from New Horizons’ LORRI instrument combined with color data from the Ralph visible and infrared imager/spectrometer to produce the movie. Movie by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
For Pluto proper, the science team is particularly interested in learning more about its atmosphere and surface features.
“We’re going to be looking for hazes in Pluto’s atmosphere,” said Weaver. “We’ll be looking in stereo to see if there are deep valleys and high mountains. We’ll also be taking a time series of photographs so that we can tell whether or not it looks like things are moving across the surface…potentially from vents on the surface.”
Charon is also of huge interest, given the moon has the same diameter as Texas and is large enough to be a planet itself, Stern said.
“It may even have an ocean beneath its surface,” Stern said. “So we’re going to look very carefully at Charon to study its geology, its composition, its interior, and to search for an atmosphere around it.”
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