{"id":16190,"date":"2015-07-14T18:21:49","date_gmt":"2015-07-14T10:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/humanitys-first-ambassador-to-pluto-makes-historic-flyby\/"},"modified":"2015-07-14T18:21:49","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T10:21:49","slug":"humanitys-first-ambassador-to-pluto-makes-historic-flyby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/humanitys-first-ambassador-to-pluto-makes-historic-flyby\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanity\u2019s first ambassador to Pluto makes historic flyby"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_7668\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7668\" style=\"width: 620px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-7668\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/11760313_10153395767546772_2253785496907644245_n.png\" alt=\"NASA's New Horizons spacecraft returned this photo of Pluto late Monday, the last view of the icy world before Tuesday's flyby. Photo credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI\" width=\"620\" height=\"620\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/11760313_10153395767546772_2253785496907644245_n.png 960w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/11760313_10153395767546772_2253785496907644245_n-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/11760313_10153395767546772_2253785496907644245_n-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/11760313_10153395767546772_2253785496907644245_n-768x768.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7668\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft returned this photo of Pluto late Monday, the last view of the icy world before Tuesday\u2019s flyby. Photo credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A speedy space probe barreled past Pluto for a one-shot flyby Tuesday, becoming the first spacecraft to ever visit the frozen, reddish world at the solar system\u2019s distant frontier 85 years after its discovery by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists celebrated the moment NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto around 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT) Tuesday, but the robot explorer was on its own, presumably carrying out a series of observations of Pluto and its moons in a tightly-choreographed sequence crafted years in advance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFifty years ago today, the United States was embarking at the beginning of an era of exploration of the solar system that will live forever in history,\u201d said Alan Stern, New Horizons\u2019 principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. \u201cFifty years ago today, the first spacecraft flew by Mars. It was called Mariner 4, and I think it\u2019s fitting that on the 50th anniversary we complete the initial reconnaissance of the planets with the exploration of Pluto.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>New Horizons \u2014 traveling nearly 31,000 mph relative to Pluto \u2014 only had a few minutes within 10,000 miles the remote world. At that speed, New Horizons traversed the nearly 1,500-mile diameter of Pluto in less than three minutes.<\/p>\n<p>The probe aimed for a box centered about 7,750 miles from Pluto, and officials said a final navigation update showed New Horizons would fly about 43 miles closer to the surface, well within specifications.<\/p>\n<p>Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland will not hear from New Horizons until around 8:53 p.m. EDT Tuesday (0053 GMT Wednesday), when the craft will pause its data collecting and radio a status message back to Earth.<\/p>\n<p>Only then will scientists know the spacecraft survived the encounter.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ll find out how it\u2019s doing, whether it survived the passage through the Pluto system,\u201d Stern said. \u201cHopefully it did, and we\u2019re counting on that, but there\u2019s a little bit of drama because this is true exploration. New Horizons is flying into the unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xIE5CrVL1Qc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Managers predicted a 1-in-10,000 chance New Horizons could have a fatal collision with a speck of dust or a pebble close in to Pluto.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI am feeling a little bit nervous, just like you do when you set your child off, but I have absolute confidence thats it\u2019s going to do what it needs to do to collect that science, and it\u2019s going to turn around and send us that burst of data and tell us that it\u2019s OK,\u201d said Alice Bowman, New Horizons\u2019 mission operations manager.<\/p>\n<p>Powered by a plutonium generator for the long journey into the solar system\u2019s dim frontier, New Horizons arrived at Pluto after a nine-year trip from Earth with its telescopic and color cameras and composition-mapping spectrometers ready to scan the dwarf planet and its five moons.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cStay tuned because our spacecraft is not in communication with the Earth,\u201d Stern said. \u201cWe programmed it to be spending its time taking important data sets that it could only take today.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Designers made New Horizons with a fixed dish antenna, so the probe is unable to transmit to Earth while spinning around to aim its camera and spectrometer apertures toward targets on Pluto and Charon.<\/p>\n<p>Engineers said the instruments would collect information for storage on New Horizons\u2019 two 64-gigabit solid-state data recorders for downlink to Earth in the coming months. It will take up to 16 months for all the data to reach Earth, streaming down at an average rate of 2 kilobits per second.<\/p>\n<p>At that rate, it takes about 42 minutes for a single full-frame black-and-white image to come down from New Horizons.<\/p>\n<p>NASA released a final image of Pluto downlinked late Monday from New Horizons, showing the salmon-colored world in greater detail than ever before. Each pixel from the picture, which the spacecraft captured around 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) Monday, is about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across, according to Stern.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s 1,000 times better than images taken by the sharp-eyed Hubble Space Telescope in Earth orbit.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNew Horizons took that image yesterday, and downlinked it to the ground,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThe bits in that image flew at the speed of light for four-and-a-half hours.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7671\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7671\" style=\"width: 621px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-7671\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/19678936742_1489195011_z.jpg\" alt=\"New Horizons scientists react to a new image of Pluto, the best ever view of the distant world three billion miles from Earth. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls\" width=\"621\" height=\"419\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/19678936742_1489195011_z.jpg 640w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/19678936742_1489195011_z-300x203.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 621px) 100vw, 621px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7671\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">New Horizons scientists react to a new image of Pluto, the best ever view of the distant world three billion miles from Earth. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>New Horizons\u2019 black-and-white telescopic camera, named LORRI, recorded the view. Image analysts on the ground added color from data supplied by the probe\u2019s Ralph instrument.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe dark regions that you see are near Pluto\u2019s equator,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThe planet is about 1,500 miles across, to give you a scale. It\u2019s got a thin or a rarefied nitrogen atmosphere, which you can\u2019t see in this image because it\u2019s clear, just like looking through other tenuous atmospheres.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Stern said it will take more time to determine exactly what New Horizons sees on Pluto, but textures and hints of the icy world\u2019s composition could be gleaned from color contrasts apparent in the picture.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou can see regions of various kinds of brightness, very dark regions near the equator, very bright regions just to the north of that, a broad intermediate zone over the pole,\u201d Stern said. \u201cWhat we know is that on the surface, we see the history of impacts, we see a history of surface activity in terms of some features that we might be able to identify as tectonic, indicating internal activity in the planet at some point in its past, or maybe even its present.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What seems to be clear is Pluto\u2019s surface is more dynamic than Charon\u2019s, which appears to be airless with fresh craters and dull gray markings.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo my eye, these images show a much younger surface on Pluto and a much older, and more battered, surface on Charon,\u201d Stern said. \u201cI hope we\u2019ll actually be able to (determine) the ages of different surface units on Pluto and Charon.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pluto\u2019s atmosphere is about one hundred thousandth the thickness of Earth\u2019s, and Stern said a first glance at the image shows no clear signature of clouds, hazes, or plumes erupting from Pluto\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n<p>But it is still early days in Pluto\u2019s exploration.<\/p>\n<p>New Horizons\u2019 best look at Pluto\u2019s climate was to come after the flyby, when the probe will monitor how radio signals passed between the spacecraft and Earth are distorted by molecules in Pluto\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe also know that this is clearly a world where both geology and atmosphere climatology play a role because Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles,\u201d Stern said. \u201cIt snows on the surface. The snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248-year orbit. Those have been observed to move around on the surface seen from three billion miles away.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Stern spearheaded a tumultuous effort to get a Pluto probe approved by NASA, which eventually selected the New Horizons mission concept in 2001. The $720 million mission launched on an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral in January 2006 and reached Jupiter 13 months later, becoming the fastest spacecraft ever dispatched from Earth.<\/p>\n<p>For many scientists, the wait to see Pluto took more than 25 years from the drawing board to Tuesday\u2019s flyby.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe haven\u2019t all keeled over with strokes and heart attacks yet in anticipation, but some of us have gotten close,\u201d said Ralph McNutt, a co-investigator on New Horizons\u2019 science team who started working on a Pluto mission in the late 1980s. \u201cThese are pictures that have been a long time in the making.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And a portion of Tombaugh\u2019s ashes are stowed aboard New Horizons. Pluto\u2019s discoverer will eventually be the first person whose remains will exit the solar system.<\/p>\n<p><b><i>Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft returned this photo of Pluto late Monday, the last view of the icy world before Tuesday\u2019s flyby. Photo credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI A speedy space probe barreled past Pluto for a one-shot flyby Tuesday, becoming the first spacecraft to ever visit the frozen, reddish world at the solar system\u2019s distant frontier 85 years [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2174,2848],"class_list":["post-16190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}