NASA's Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Has Awakened

NASA's Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Has Awakened - by John Wenz/ Science/ Space/ Deep Space/ PopularMechanics.com

"On Saturday, the New Horizons spacecraft will awaken from slumber for the final time as it nears its final approach to Pluto—NASA's first ever visit to the formerly ninth planet, and the first time it will get clear pictures of the small, chilly world. The mission's July 2015 approach to Pluto is still seven months away, but New Horizons' science mission will officially begin on Dec. 6..."


NASA


Richard

NASA Probe to Arrive at Pluto Carrying Ashes of Clyde Tombaugh - by Sarah Knapton/ Science Editor/ The Telegraph/ telegraph.com

"NASA’s New Horizons probe will arrive at the dwarf-planet carrying the astrophysicist’s ashes.

When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 he could never have imagined that the icy world would one day be his final resting place.

But this week NASA’s New Horizons probe will arrive at the dwarf-planet carrying the astrophysicist’s ashes.

The mission is hoping to answer fundamental questions about the 9th rock from the Sun and will send back the first close-up pictures of our elusive neighbour. It could even help explain the origin of life on Earth..."


An artist's impression of the New Horizons probe approaching Pluto Photo: Nasa/Rex Features


Richard

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30954673New Horizons Probe Eyes Pluto For Historic Encounter - By Jonathan Amos/ Science Correspondent, BBC News / Science / bbc.com


A Nasa probe is to start photographing the icy world of Pluto, to prepare itself for a historic encounter in July.

The New Horizons spacecraft has travelled 5bn km (3bn miles) over nine years to get near the dwarf planet.

And with 200m km still to go, its images of Pluto will show only a speck of light against the stars.

But the data will be critical in helping to align the probe properly for what will be just a fleeting fly-by.

Pluto will be photographed repeatedly during the approach, to determine the probe's position relative to the dwarf planet, explained Mark Holdridge, from the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Baltimore.

"We then perform a number of correction manoeuvres to realign our trajectory with the reference trajectory, thus ensuring we hit our aim point to travel through the Pluto system," he said.

Any initial correction is likely to be made in March.


The Pluto system has five known moons. Others may be discovered in the coming months
When New Horizons arrives at Pluto it will be moving so fast - at almost 14km/s - that going into orbit around the distant world is impossible; it must barrel straight through instead.

One complication is that the seven different instruments aboard the spacecraft need to work at different distances to get their data, and so the team has constructed a very elaborate observation schedule for them all.

But what this means is that very precise timing will be required to make sure the flyby runs smoothly.

The closest approach to Pluto is set for around 11:50 GMT on 14 July - at a miss distance of roughly 13,695km from the surface.

Mission planners want the exact timings nailed to within 100 seconds. New Horizons will know then where and when to point the instruments.



When it gets to Pluto, the New Horizons Probe Will Have a Packed Schedule of Observations

Richard

New Horizons Probe Delivers Pluto Pictures as a Birthday Tribute - by Alan Boyle/ Science/ Space/ nbcnews.com

"It's been 18 years since Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's discoverer, passed away — but on Wednesday the late astronomer got a birthday present that would have made him beam with joy: the closest close-ups ever taken of the dwarf planet, delivered by NASA's New Horizons probe.

"This is our birthday tribute to Professor Tombaugh and the Tombaugh family, in honor of his discovery and life achievements — which truly became a harbinger of 21st-century planetary astronomy," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said Wednesday in a news release about the images.

The pictures, taken on Jan. 25 and Jan. 27, were the first views of Pluto acquired during an imaging campaign that will climax on July 14 with the first-ever flyby of that icy mini-world, 3 billion miles from the sun.

New Horizons is still roughly 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) away from Pluto — which means the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon, show up as mere dots. But the view is due to improve in the months ahead: By May, the pictures taken by New Horizons' LORRI camera should outdo the best that the Hubble Space Telescope can manage..."


NASA / JHUAPL / SwR
An image acquired by the New Horizons spacecraft's LORRI high-resolution imager shows Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, as seen from a distance of nearly 203 million miles on Jan. 25. The view should improve as New Horizons nears its July 14 flyby of the dwarf planet.


Richard

NASA's Pluto Bound Spacecraft Has Awakened - by John Wenz/ Space/ Deep Space/ PopularMechanics.com

"Update, January 29: The countdown to New Horizon's approach is officially on, with the craft already taking pictures for its closest approach in July. There's a counter on NASA's page if you need the info down to the second, but in the meantime, we should soon have images of the once-and-not-so-future ninth planet (or second dwarf planet)..."

Latest New Horizon Images of Pluto from NASA


Richard

Pluto: NASA Probe Set for Fly-Past of Frozen 'Dwarf-Planet' - by Joel Achenbach for the Washington Post/ Space/ Science/ The Guardian/ theguardian.com

"Pluto is so far away (4.8bn km) and so small (about two-thirds the size of the Earth’s moon) that we’ve never had a good look at it, not even with the Hubble space telescope. In Hubble images, Pluto has always been a tiny, pixelated blob. Until now.

A Nasa spacecraft, New Horizons, is bearing down on the dwarf planet at 5,100km/h. The robotic probe, which weighs half a tonne and is shaped like a vacuum cleaner attachment, will fly past Pluto, its cameras and instruments ravenously gobbling data, at 11.49am GMT on 14 July.

That, at least, is what we can expect to happen given the current trajectory of New Horizons and the laws of physics. But this is not a mission free of hazard. A craft travelling so fast – New Horizons is the fastest spaceship ever launched from Earth – can be disabled by a collision with something as small as a grain of rice..."



Richard

NASA'S New Horizons Team Works To Revive Pluto-Bound Probe After Anomaly - by Alan Boyle/ Science/ Space/ nbcnews.com

"NASA said its New Horizons probe suffered a temporary communication breakdown on Saturday, 10 days before it's scheduled to fly past Pluto, and the mission team is working to restore normal operations.

In a mission update, NASA said the team lost contact with the piano-sized probe at 1:54 p.m. ET, when it had less than 7.5 million miles left in its 3 billion-mile journey to the dwarf planet. The spacecraft's autopilot system switched control from its primary to its backup computer and restored communications at 3:15 p.m., NASA said..."

Richard

Something 'Scary' Went Wrong with NASA's Probe to Pluto - by Jessica Orwig/ Science/ Business Insider/ businessinsider.com

"NASA got an unexpected surprise on Saturday: Its New Horizons spacecraft cut off communications with Earth as it was headed toward Pluto.

NASA was able to re-establish communications with the spacecraft within 90 minutes, and it reported that it was "healthy" and still on course to fly by Pluto.

But to reconnect with Earth, the spacecraft kicked itself into safe mode, and it is now no longer taking photos or collecting other scientific data.

"This is scary," planetary scientist Emily Lakdawalla wrote for The Planetary Society. "It's not what the team wanted to be dealing with right now."...

...But it looks as if NASA has resolved the issue:...

...NASA reported on Sunday that it planned to re-establish normal operations and start collecting scientific data on Tuesday..."




Richard

Pluto's Spots Turn Into Weird Splotches in New View From New Horizons - by Alan Boyle/ Science/ Space/ nbcnews.com

LAUREL, Md. — "Remember those weird black spots that showed up on Pluto's surface a couple of weeks ago in pictures from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft? Now that the piano-sized probe has closed in to a distance of less than 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers), the spots look like even weirder splotches.

This view of the dwarf planet, captured on Saturday, may be the "last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto's far side for decades to come," the $728 million mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, said in an image advisory.

That's because the splotches are turning out of the field of vision for New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. When the spacecraft makes its climactic flyby on Tuesday, coming within 8,000 miles (12,500 kilometers) of the surface, a different swath of territory will be turned toward the camera — with a bright heart-shaped region front and center..."


New Horizons' last look at Pluto's Charon-facing hemisphere reveals intriguing geologic details that are of keen interest to mission scientists. This image, taken early Saturday morning, 2015, shows newly resolved linear features above the equatorial region that intersect, suggestive of polygonal shapes. This image was captured when the spacecraft was 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers) from Pluto. NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI



Richard

Infographic: New Horizons' Path to Pluto - by Raoul Rañoa /Science/ Science Now/ Los Angeles Times/ latimes.com

"NASA's New Horizons is the first spacecraft designed to study objects in the Kuiper belt, the region of the solar system beyond Neptune. After traveling 3 billion miles, the craft is about to fly by Pluto, giving humanity its first detailed look at the dwarf planet and its large moon, Charon. New Horizons will collect all sorts of data as it flies past, and mission managers say it will take more than a year for all of it to reach Earth.

Here's a look at how New Horizons got to Pluto and how it will study the distant planet..."


Amazing accomplishment. Kudos to all involved!


Richard

How New Horizons Survived the 40-Year Glitch and Made It to Pluto - by Corey S. Powell/ Out There/ Discover/ Science for the Curious/ The Magazine/ discovermagazine.com

"In space exploration, there are a million ways that things can go wrong and just one way that they can go right. When the New Horizons probe skims less than 8,000 miles past the surface of Pluto on July 14, it will happen only because a large team of scientists, engineers, and mission planners managed to eliminate all the wrong and navigate their way to the right, a process that has taken more than 40 years to fully unfold..."


Pluto and Charon seen by New Horizons from 3.7 million miles. This spectacular view, and the mission that made it possible, nearly didn’t happen–not once, but over and over. (Credit: NASA/JHU-APL/SWRI)



Richard

Pluto Probe Finds Surprises Ahead of Its Close Encounter - by Jesse Emspak/ Science/ SmithsonianMag.com

"From dark poles to weird "whales", New Horizons is giving us a taste of the historic science we can expect from its visit to Pluto.

Pluto has long been a mystery among the classical planets—baffling astronomers since its discovery in 1930. The tiny world is dark and distant, orbiting so far from the sun that a Plutonian year lasts for about 248 Earth years.

So far, the best images of Pluto and its system of oddball moons have been blurry and showed no surface detail, leaving Pluto's geography trapped in the realm of artists and science fiction writers. What little data we have about its atmosphere and composition has been gleaned from telescopic observations, as no human-made spacecraft has ever come in close for a visit.

Now, all that is about to change. After a nine-year, three-billion-mile journey—and a brief technical hiccup on July 4—the New Horizons probe will get within 7,750 miles of the mysterious world during a flyby on July 14. The spacecraft has been making observations as it closes in on its target, and already it's found things that tantalize the science teams at NASA:..."

The article has a very cool Tanimation made from New Horizons data shows Pluto and its largest moon Charon in their orbital dance.


Richard

New Horizons Spacecraft Closes In On Pluto for First Close-Ups - by David Perlman/ Science/ SFGate/ sfgate.com

"Pluto, the mysterious dwarf planet that no spacecraft has ever visited and no earthbound telescope has ever seen in any detail, is about to yield its secrets.

On Tuesday morning, Earth time, seven instruments aboard a spinning NASA vehicle called New Horizons will fly past icy Pluto and its five moons on a perilous discovery mission through the far distant reaches of our solar system.

Nearly 10 years after its launch from Cape Canaveral and a voyage of 3 billion miles, the spacecraft will fly less than 7,800 miles above Pluto’s surface for the world’s first encounter with the dark Plutonian system.

The flyby, at close to 31,000 miles an hour, will last barely six hours in all.

But during those fleeting moments, New Horizons’ long-range telescope and its six other instruments will harvest far more information about Pluto and its role in the solar system than earthbound astronomers have ever gathered.

The instruments will map the icy surfaces of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, and reveal the first details of their geology and composition.

They will analyze the chemicals in Pluto’s icy atmosphere — like nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide — and ferret out any unknown exotic ones..."


Photo: Nasa/seti Institute, New York Times
In an illustration provided by NASA and the SETI Institute, Pluto and its moons, seen from the perspective of Hydra, the outermost of the five. New research has offered a more precise look at the wobbly orbit of Nix, which is jostled by the competing gravitational pulls of Pluto and Charon — so close in mass that some scientists regard them as a double planet.


Be sure to click through the 25 images - simply amazing.


Richard

NASA Probe Nears Pluto, Carrying Ashes of Man Who Discovered It - by Jethro Mullen, CNN/ US/ cnn.com

(CNN) "When a NASA probe whizzes past Pluto on Tuesday, the man who discovered the dwarf planet 85 years ago will be there.

A small amount of the ashes of American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh are on board the New Horizons spacecraft, which has spent more than nine years traveling to the outer reaches of the solar system.

The probe is set to pass within about 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto' s surface, the closest any spacecraft has got to the icy world, beaming back data and images.

Rewind to 1930, and Pluto wasn't even on the solar system map.

Tombaugh, who grew up on a farm in Kansas, was working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Previously an amateur astronomer, he had been hired to help find a planet beyond Neptune..."


Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930 at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Richard

Pluto is Larger Than We Previously Thought - by Jacob Koffler/ Science/ Space/ time.com

"The former planet is 1,473 miles in diameter, according to new images from NASA's New Horizons mission

It’s still not a planet, but Pluto is bigger than experts thought.

NASA reported on Monday that scientists on their New Horizons Mission have determined the size of Pluto. The former planet is 1,473 miles in diameter, slightly larger than previous estimates, making it the largest known object in the solar system beyond Neptune’s orbit.

Pluto’s size has been notoriously difficult to determine since its discovery in 1930 due to what NASA called “complicating factors from its atmosphere.”

“We are excited to finally lay this question to rest,” said Bill McKinnon, a scientist on the mission..."

Richard

What New Horizons Is Looking For on Pluto, and How - by Jay Bennett/ Popular Science/ popsci.com

"At 7:50am EDT tomorrow, July 14, New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, will perform the first close-encounter flyby of Pluto and its system of five known moons. During that approach, New Horizons will be flying within 6,000 miles of Pluto and collect 100 times more data than it can send home in a single day. The instruments on the spacecraft will take thousands of photos, measure Pluto’s temperature and magnetic field, map the surface topography, determine Pluto’s atmospheric composition, and search for undiscovered moons, rings and subterranean oceans. To send all of that data back to Earth will take 16 months.

“We’ll be sending home things that nobody has ever seen through the rest of 2015 and into October of 2016,” says Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission. “We could be running down the hallways with huge discoveries 12 or 15 months after the encounter.” ..."


Pluto by moonlight
JHUAPL / SwRI
The sun on Pluto's moon Charon is 1,000 times dimmer that here on Earth, but it will still be bright enough to capture the first images of Pluto's night region.


Richard

A New Horizons' Pluto Flyby Timeline - by Kenneth Chang/ Science/ International New York Times/ The New York Times/ nytimes.com

"NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is now less than one day and one million miles from Pluto.

"Everything is going great," Glen Fountain, the mission's project manager, said on Sunday.

Here's what to expect when you're expecting Pluto:

The spacecraft is on target, so the mission team has passed on making any small corrections to the trajectory or the computer programming for the encounter.
At 11:17 p.m. Monday, the mission control at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland will receive the last update from the spacecraft before the flyby begins. The spacecraft then begins 22 hours of complicated choreography for its observations as it speeds toward Pluto at 30,800 miles per hour. Because of the spacecraft's design, it cannot collect data and talk to Earth at the same time.

Around 7:50 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, give or take a minute or so, it will zip 7,800 miles above Pluto's surface, providing an extraordinary close-up first look. The clearest photos of the surface will have a resolution of about 75 yards per pixel. NASA TV will provide coverage beginning at 7:30 a.m.
At the time of the flyby, no one on Earth will know the fate of New Horizons and whether it is accomplishing its tasks. Around 4:30 p.m. the spacecraft will turn its antenna back toward Earth to send a brief "Hi, I'm still alive" message..."


Richard

The Camera Behind the New Pluto Photos - by Robinson Meyer/ Technology/ The Atlantic/ theatlantic.com

"How to build a camera that travels billions of miles from Earth.

For decades after its discovery in 1930, Pluto looked like nothing more than a gray smudge in the abyss of space. We knew it was there—even knew its size and gravity—but, without better images, we could not answer seemingly basic questions about it. Was it pocked by craters? What was its atmosphere like?

Our understanding of the orb has slowly improved (with the Hubble Space Telescope’s help), but this week it takes a cosmic step forward. On Tuesday morning, NASA’s New Horizons probe zipped by Pluto and its dwarf moon, Charon. After a nine-year journey from Earth, New Horizons took hundreds of images in mere hours on Tuesday—images that will fill textbooks and museum exhibits for decades, as well as help scientists figure out how our solar system came to support life.

There are three cameras aboard New Horizons.

I talked to Lisa Hardaway, an engineer at Ball Aerospace in Colorado who led technical development of the one called “Ralph.” Ralph captures visible and some infrared light. When you see Pluto looking tan- and sepia-toned in the new, high-resolution photos, you’re looking at data captured by Ralph..."


The highest-resolution photo of Pluto ever, captured by the New Horizons probe this week (NASA)


Richard

Pluto Mission: NASA's New Horizons 'Phones Home" After Blackout - by Amanda Barnett, CNN/ US/ cnn.com

Laurel, Maryland (CNN) "NASA has re-established contact with its New Horizons spacecraft after a planned communications blackout as the probe completes humankind's first flyby of Pluto.

Mission managers who were packed into the New Horizons "mission control" room anxiously waiting to hear from the spacecraft broke into applause.

The probe had spent more than 12 hours out of contact while it collected data from Pluto and its five moons.

The communications outage was planned, but it still had scientists on edge. The flyby was the most dangerous part of the mission; there was a chance that stray dust in the Pluto system could collide with the spacecraft..."


Richard

New Horizons Reveals Ice Mountains on Pluto - by Jonathan Corum/ Science/ Space/ The New York Times/ nytimes.com

"A day after its successful flyby, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent back the first close-up photographs of Pluto, revealing a young surface dotted with ice mountains. The piano-size spacecraft traveled nine years and three billion miles to study the dwarf planet and its five moons..."


NASA

"A day after its successful flyby of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent back the first close-up images of Pluto, revealing 11,000-foot ice mountains and a surprising absence of craters."


Richard

To the OP can you give us the website to your thread that showed the various photos of the universe ?

pedro47 said:

To the OP can you give us the website to your thread that showed the various photos of the universe ?

Click to expand...

Hi Pedro,

I'm not sure what you're asking for. Are you talking about the Hubble Telescope photos of the universe?


Richard

First Look at New Horizons' Pluto and Charon Images: "Baffling in a very interesting and wonderful way" - by Emily Lakdawalla/ Blogs/ planetary.org

"The New Horizons spacecraft has only had time to downlink seven LORRI images since its flyby of Pluto yesterday. Today's press briefing at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland was preceded by hours of New Horizons team members cryptically dropping hints on Twitter at astonishing details in those few images. And the images are astonishing, as well as beautiful, surprising, and puzzling. Team member John Spencer aptly summed them up when he described them as "baffling in a very interesting and wonderful way." ..."


NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI
Charon’s surprising, youthful, and varied terrain
Remarkable new details of Pluto’s largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 466,000 kilometers. The LORRI image has been combined with color information obtained by New Horizons’ Ralph instrument on July 13.


Richard

Pluto Shows Its 'Heart' in Stunning Flyover Animation - by Rachel Feltman/ washingtonpost.com

"On Friday, NASA released a new image of Pluto's surface, revealing the icy plains that make up part of the "heart" first spotted in earlier images. Now informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, the "heart" is revealing strange geological features — which you can see firsthand in the stunning animation below..."



Peering closely at the “heart of Pluto,” in the western half of what mission scientists have informally named Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), New Horizons’ Ralph instrument revealed evidence of carbon monoxide ice. The contours indicate that the concentration of frozen carbon monoxide increases towards the center of the “bull’s eye.” These data were acquired by the spacecraft on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on July 16. Full credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute



Richard

The First Photos Taken of Every Planet in Our Solar System - by David Tobia/ Space/New Republic/ newrepublic.com

"In honor of Pluto, we look back at the visual history of space exploration.

Scientists may no longer consider Pluto a planet, but it remained the last unexplored world of our solar system until Tuesday, when the fastest spacecraft to ever leave Earth reached its elusive goal. New Horizons launched January 19, 2006, hurtling through space at about 34,000 miles per hour. The spacecraft has traveled 3 billion miles on its way to Pluto, which shows how far space exploration has come: The first missions to photograph planets from space traveled just 65 and 6,118 miles to capture Earth and Mars. Here are the first photos taken of every planet in our solar system..."


NASA
Venus



Richard