{"id":16230,"date":"2015-07-01T01:17:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T17:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/new-horizons-two-weeks-from-pluto-flyby\/"},"modified":"2015-07-01T01:17:36","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T17:17:36","slug":"new-horizons-two-weeks-from-pluto-flyby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/new-horizons-two-weeks-from-pluto-flyby\/","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons two weeks from Pluto flyby"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"New
New Horizons captured this view Pluto and its moon Charon early June 29. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe, now just 10 million miles from Pluto and 14 days from a historic July 14 flyby, is operating in near flawless fashion, making increasingly detailed observations of the enigmatic dwarf planet and its large moon Charon, project engineers and scientists reported Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019ve been looking at the pictures on the (New Horizons) website, you can see that Pluto and Charon are becoming more distinct in their surface features,\u201d said mission operations manager Alice Bowman. \u201cEvery day is bringing new features into light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Streaking through space at more than 30,000 mph, New Horizons is on track to pass within about 7,800 miles of Pluto a few seconds shy of 7:50 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on July 14. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will pass within 17,900 miles of Charon, the largest of Pluto\u2019s five known moons.<\/p>\n

Throughout the encounter, New Horizons will train its cameras and other instruments on Pluto and its retinue of moons for unprecedented close-range observations, revealing a never-before-seen world at the edge of the solar system.<\/p>\n

Over the next few days, Bowman said, engineers plan to uplink the complex sequence of commands that will be executed aboard the spacecraft during the flyby. At the same time, they will be analyzing the probe\u2019s flight path to determine whether another small trajectory correction maneuver might be needed to make sure the spacecraft hits the desired close-approach aim point.<\/p>\n

But the work is going smoothly, and after a nine-year journey covering some three billion miles since launch in January 2006, the piano-size spacecraft is finally on the doorstep of Pluto, the famously demoted \u201cninth planet\u201d and the largest known world in the vast Kuiper belt that defines the outer solar system.<\/p>\n

Scientists can barely contain their excitement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are features on Pluto that we were starting to see before, and they\u2019re coming into sharper and sharper focus,\u201d Cathy Olkin, the deputy project scientist, said in a NASA update Tuesday. \u201cWe see a bright region on Pluto\u2019s north pole, it might be a polar cap, we\u2019re looking to get closer and investigate that further. We\u2019re seeing detailed images of the closest approach hemisphere. There are dark regions and bright regions, and it\u2019s going to be really exciting!\u201d<\/p>\n

Pluto and Charon represent a true binary planet. Charon has 12 percent the mass of Pluto and the two orbit a common center of gravity that is above the surface of Pluto. For comparison, Earth\u2019s moon is just 1 percent as massive as its parent and the common center of gravity is well below Earth\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

Scientists are intrigued by \u201ca dark region in Charon\u2019s pole, which is surprising to me,\u201d Olkin said. \u201cA lot of times in polar regions you see bright features like we do on Pluto and Mars and Earth where you have a bright polar cap. But this region is dark compared to the rest of the surface, so it\u2019s very tantalizing. We\u2019re just waiting to get closer and see more about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first color images from New Horizons show Pluto is distinctly reddish compared to its companion.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see, as Pluto and Charon are both rotating, that Pluto is more red on all the faces compared to Charon being gray,\u201d Olkin said. \u201cThis confirms what we knew from ground-based observing, but it\u2019s giving us more and more detail as we get closer and closer.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Pluto\u2019s vast distance from the sun it takes radio signals from Earth, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, nearly four-and-a-half hours to reach New Horizons. As such, real-time commanding is not possible and the computer commands needed to accurately aim the spacecraft and its instruments must be uplinked well in advance.<\/p>\n

To work properly, New Horizons must have an accurate idea of where it is and a good idea where Pluto is in its orbit. As the flyby approaches, engineers are studying navigation images beamed back from the probe to refine their knowledge of the dwarf planet\u2019s orbit to make absolutely sure New Horizons hits its flyby target.<\/p>\n

The next week or so will be particularly busy as the mission enters the home stretch.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to be putting up the flyby sequence on board the spacecraft in the next couple of days, to both the primary and backup computers,\u201d Bowman said \u201cThere\u2019s a possibility we\u2019ll be doing a trajectory correction maneuver, and of course getting down lots of science data and optical navigation data. It\u2019s going to be great!\u201d<\/p>\n

Fran Bagenal, a co-investigator at the University of Colorado, said she doesn\u2019t know what New Horizons might ultimately reveal. But she\u2019s sure it will defy expectations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually think we have no idea what we\u2019re going to find,\u201d she said. \u201cYou see these fabulous paintings people have drawn of icy surfaces, and clouds, and mist, and rocks, and mountains. It could be completely different!<\/p>\n

\u201cThe satisfaction of the whole mission will come when we see those first pictures and we actually get a glimpse of what the icy surface looks like. It really tells us about how our world, our solar system, formed, and how it got to be the way it is. So it\u2019s cool! Let\u2019s go there. Let\u2019s go explore it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION New Horizons captured this view Pluto and its moon Charon early June 29. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe, now just 10 million miles from Pluto and 14 days from a historic July 14 flyby, is operating in near flawless fashion, […]<\/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":[1861,2174,2848],"class_list":["post-16230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-jhuapl","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16230"}],"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=16230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}