{"id":16668,"date":"2015-01-15T20:32:11","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T12:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/new-horizons-lined-up-for-final-approach-to-pluto\/"},"modified":"2015-01-15T20:32:11","modified_gmt":"2015-01-15T12:32:11","slug":"new-horizons-lined-up-for-final-approach-to-pluto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/new-horizons-lined-up-for-final-approach-to-pluto\/","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons lined up for final approach to Pluto"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Artist's
Artist\u2019s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft, Pluto and its moon Charon. Credit: JHUAPL\/SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pluto is in the sights of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft, which started collecting around-the-clock science data Thursday as it speeds toward the first close encounter with the distant world in July.<\/p>\n

The mission\u2019s encounter phase formally started Thursday 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

Photos will come later, with the first imaging campaign of the Pluto encounter set to begin Jan. 25. The imagery will not be as sharp as photos from the Hubble Space Telescope until May, when New Horizons will start taking pictures showing Pluto in unprecedented detail through the mission\u2019s July 14 flyby.<\/p>\n

Thursday\u2019s milestone came the same week as the ninth anniversary of the mission\u2019s launch from Earth on Jan. 19, 2006. New Horizons is now about 134 million miles from Pluto, a fraction of the distance separating it from Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur knowledge of Pluto is quite meager,\u201d said Alan Stern, the mission\u2019s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, during a press briefing in November. \u201cDespite the march of technology on the ground that has given us big telescopes, very powerful spectrometers, and even the Hubble Space Telescope in Earth orbit, we know very little about this world. In a real sense, it\u2019s very much like our knowledge of Mars before our first mission to Mars 50 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

When New Horizons zooms past Pluto on July 14 \u2014 passing 6,200 miles above its icy crust \u2014 the spacecraft\u2019s camera will be able to see surface features as small as 70 meters (230 feet) across.<\/p>\n

If the probe was flying over New York, Stern said images from the New Horizons camera could allow scientists to count the lakes in Central Park and wharfs along the Hudson River.<\/p>\n

That is a big improvement over photos of Pluto obtained by Hubble, which show the faraway dwarf planet just a few pixels across.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t see very much,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThat\u2019s the exciting part. From my standpoint, this is a Christmas present sitting under the tree that\u2019s been waiting while we sped across the solar system to unwrap it. We are so looking forward to turning this very fuzzy little picture of this very distant and small planet into something real, and to do it by taking the world along.\u201d<\/p>\n

Images taken by the craft\u2019s LORRI telescopic camera beginning Jan. 25 will help ground controllers guide New Horizons toward Pluto, which will still appear as a dot.<\/p>\n

The best frame-filling images of Pluto will not come until July.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is much more than a single day,\u201d said Hal Weaver, the mission\u2019s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. \u201cOf course, July 14, 2015, that\u2019s the day that we reach the closest approach point to Pluto, and most of our best results will come from a few days around that time period.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I really want to emphasize that we\u2019ll have lots of juicy science \u2014 historic science \u2014 accumulated well before the day of the closest approach,\u201d Weaver said.<\/p>\n

The milestone achieved Thursday \u2014 the start of Approach Phase 1 \u2014 is focused on taking pictures to home in on Pluto, allowing New Horizons to hit a narrow aim point designed to get the best observations of Pluto\u2019s surface topography, composition and atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Mission planners have allotted several opportunities for New Horizons to adjust its path toward Pluto, with the next chance for a course correction maneuver in mid-March, Stern said in an email to Spaceflight Now.<\/p>\n

Weaver said New Horizons will also take background measurements of the particle and dust environment during Approach Phase 1, which runs through mid-April, to compare with data it collects at Pluto.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we move from later in April and into mid-June, that\u2019s the time period where we start to get better than Hubble,\u201d Weaver said. \u201cWe\u2019ll also be doing deep searches for satellites (moons) and rings better than can be done with Hubble or any other observatory on the Earth, and then it just gets better and better and better as we\u2019re closer and closer to Pluto.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the time of closest approach, it\u2019s going to be astounding,\u201d Weaver said. \u201cIt really will be. We\u2019re going to be transforming Pluto from this pixelated image \u2026 into a completely new world, with complexity (and) diversity that we can\u2019t even imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n

After it swoops past Pluto, New Horizons will continue taking data through the end of 2015 before taking aim on a new target in the Kuiper belt, a zone of little-studied worlds beyond the orbit of Neptune.<\/p>\n

Then comes the data playback. It will take 16 months for all the spacecraft\u2019s data on Pluto to stream down to the ground \u2014 a function of the volume of information scientists intend to collect and the probe\u2019s distance from Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is really quite an epic journey,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThree billion miles across the entirety of our planetary system, from the inner planets, to the middle solar system, to the third zone \u2014 the Kuiper belt \u2014 and for the first time. No voyage like this has been conducted since the epic days of Voyager, and nothing like it is planned again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist\u2019s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft, Pluto and its moon Charon. Credit: JHUAPL\/SwRI Pluto is in the sights of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft, which started collecting around-the-clock science data Thursday as it speeds toward the first close encounter with the distant world in July. The mission\u2019s encounter phase formally started Thursday with the activation […]<\/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":[2884,1861,2174,2848,2612],"class_list":["post-16668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-alan-stern","tag-jhuapl","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto","tag-swri"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668"}],"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=16668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}