{"id":16804,"date":"2014-11-30T21:57:21","date_gmt":"2014-11-30T13:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/ground-team-ready-to-rouse-pluto-probe-for-historic-flyby\/"},"modified":"2014-11-30T21:57:21","modified_gmt":"2014-11-30T13:57:21","slug":"ground-team-ready-to-rouse-pluto-probe-for-historic-flyby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/ground-team-ready-to-rouse-pluto-probe-for-historic-flyby\/","title":{"rendered":"Ground team ready to rouse Pluto probe for historic flyby"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Artist's
Artist\u2019s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On the final stretch of a speedy nine-year trek through the solar system, NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft will be awakened from hibernation Dec. 6 for an encounter with Pluto, a mysterious world that has captured imaginations and will soon be revealed in reality.<\/p>\n

The plutonium-powered probe \u2014 roughly the size and shape of a grand piano \u2014 is heading for a flyby 6,200 miles from Pluto\u2019s icy, unexplored surface on July 14, 2015.<\/p>\n

But scientists plan months of increasingly detailed observations of Pluto before then, beginning in January with long-range imaging to help navigators keep New Horizons on course for the make-or-break encounter.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re at the very tail end of this very long cruise across almost 3 billion miles of our journey from the Earth to the Pluto system,\u201d said Alan Stern, principal investigator on the New Horizons mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. \u201cOn Dec. 6, we\u2019ll wake New Horizons up from its last hibernation and we will be on the doorstep of the Pluto system. Encounter starts just a few weeks later on Jan. 15.\u201d<\/p>\n

New Horizons launched aboard an Atlas 5 rocket on Jan. 19, 2006. The craft left Earth at record speed and reached Jupiter in February 2007 to pick up even more velocity, using the giant planet\u2019s immense gravity field to slingshot toward Pluto.<\/p>\n

The $700 million mission is the first to visit a halo of dark, icy worlds loitering outside the orbit of Neptune. Known as the Kuiper belt, the ring includes Pluto and thousands more objects which remain mostly undiscovered.<\/p>\n

Stern touts New Horizons as the last in a wave of \u201cfirst reconnaissance\u201d missions dispatched from Earth since the 1960s to explore the planets.<\/p>\n

The mission, Stern said, \u201cis going to be truly historic, not in rewriting the textbook, but in writing the textbook about the Pluto system and Kuiper belt.\u201d<\/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

Ground controllers put New Horizons to sleep intermittently through the probe\u2019s nine-year cruise. The hibernations save time, Bowman said, allowing scientists to focus on planning the mission\u2019s future scientific endeavors instead of tracking its flight through the void of space.<\/p>\n

Computer commands already installed on the spacecraft will automatically wake up New Horizons on Dec. 6, then it will take more than four hours for radio signals from the probe to reach Earth at light speed.<\/p>\n

Officials at the New Horizons control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland should receive confirmation of the spacecraft\u2019s wakeup around 9:30 p.m. EST on Saturday (0230 GMT Sunday), according to Alice Bowman, mission operations manager at APL.<\/p>\n

Engineers plan around six weeks of activities \u2014 memory checks, instrument calibrations, navigation updates \u2014 to prepare New Horizons for the official start of its encounter phase in January.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll this is being done to prepare for the big show, which begins Jan. 15, 2015,\u201d Bowman said.<\/p>\n

Seven instruments on New Horizons will take pictures and measure everything from the composition of Pluto and its moons, to the nature of Pluto\u2019s atmosphere, to how Pluto is influenced by the sun, which appears 900 times dimmer than the sun seen from Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe begin the observatory phase in January, and it continues until about April,\u201d Stern said. \u201cBy May, we will be delivering imagery that\u2019s better than Hubble, and it just gets better every week from there on in until we storm the gates of Pluto on Bastille Day, July 14, 2015.\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 at Pluto. Credit: NASA On the final stretch of a speedy nine-year trek through the solar system, NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft will be awakened from hibernation Dec. 6 for an encounter with Pluto, a mysterious world that has captured imaginations and will soon be revealed in reality. The […]<\/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":[2174,4004],"class_list":["post-16804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto-flyby"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16804"}],"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=16804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16804\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}