{"id":16603,"date":"2015-02-04T20:04:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T12:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasas-pluto-probe-takes-new-pictures-of-target\/"},"modified":"2015-02-04T20:04:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T12:04:17","slug":"nasas-pluto-probe-takes-new-pictures-of-target","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasas-pluto-probe-takes-new-pictures-of-target\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Pluto probe takes new pictures of target"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_3649\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3649\" style=\"width: 621px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-3649\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/15-018_0.jpg\" alt=\"A view of Pluto and its moon Charon from the New Horizons spacecraft's LORRI camera. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI\" width=\"621\" height=\"621\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/15-018_0.jpg 400w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/15-018_0-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/15-018_0-300x300.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 621px) 100vw, 621px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3649\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A view of Pluto and its moon Charon from the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s LORRI camera. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Less than six months from a historic close-up of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft has glimpsed its distant target at a range of 126 million miles, and better pictures are coming.<\/p>\n<p>The images show Pluto and its moon Charon as pixelated figures. Pluto\u2019s smaller satellites are too tiny for New Horizons to resolve at its current distance.<\/p>\n<p>The spacecraft\u2019s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager captured the images Jan. 25 and Jan. 27, obtaining the first pictures of Pluto since New Horizons woke up from hibernation in December.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPluto is finally becoming more than just a pinpoint of light,\u201d said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. \u201cLORRI has now resolved Pluto, and the dwarf planet will continue to grow larger and larger in the images as New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward its targets. The new LORRI images also demonstrate that the camera\u2019s performance is unchanged since it was launched more than nine years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>New Horizons will take hundreds more pictures of Pluto in the next few months, giving the mission\u2019s navigators on Earth a fix on the mission\u2019s target to plot course correction maneuvers ahead of the craft\u2019s July 14 flyby.<\/p>\n<p>The spacecraft is shooting for a narrow flyby corridor about 6,200 miles from Pluto, allowing New Horizons to get the best data on the dwarf planet\u2019s structure, composition and terrain.<\/p>\n<p>A minor rocket burn is scheduled for March 10 to refine the probe\u2019s trajectory toward Pluto.<\/p>\n<p>New Horizons is speeding toward Pluto at relative speed of about 31,000 mph, and the mission\u2019s approach phase formally started Jan. 15 with the activation of the probe\u2019s dust and plasma instruments to collect information on the environment at the outer frontier of the solar system.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe U.S. has led the exploration of the planets and continues to do so with New Horizons,\u201d said Curt Niebur, New Horizons program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. \u201cThis mission will obtain images to map Pluto and its moons better than has ever been achieved by any previous planetary mission.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Some time in May, officials expect New Horizons to start delivering images sharper than the best photos of Pluto ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.<\/p>\n<p>The New Horizons team released the new images of Pluto on the birthday of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930 and died in 1997.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is our birthday tribute to Professor Tombaugh and the Tombaugh family, in honor of his discovery and life achievements \u2014 which truly became a harbinger of 21st century planetary astronomy,\u201d said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. \u201cThese images of Pluto, clearly brighter and closer than those New Horizons took last July from twice as far away, represent our first steps at turning the pinpoint of light Clyde saw in the telescopes at Lowell Observatory 85 years ago, into a planet before the eyes of the world this summer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>New Horizons carries some of Clyde Tombaugh\u2019s ashes on the journey to Pluto.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy dad would be thrilled with New Horizons,\u201d said Clyde Tombaugh\u2019s daughter Annette Tombaugh of Las Cruces, New Mexico, in a statement. \u201cTo actually see the planet that he had discovered, and find out more about it \u2014 to get to see the moons of Pluto\u2013 he would have been astounded. I\u2019m sure it would have meant so much to him if he were still alive today.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b><i>Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A view of Pluto and its moon Charon from the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s LORRI camera. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI Less than six months from a historic close-up of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft has glimpsed its distant target at a range of 126 million miles, and better pictures are coming. The images show Pluto and its moon [&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":[2884,4164,1861,3862,2174,2848],"class_list":["post-16603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-alan-stern","tag-clyde-tombaugh","tag-jhuapl","tag-lorri","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16603"}],"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=16603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}