New Horizons: A mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt

[Ian]

New Horizons on it's way to Pluto

The New Horizons mission to Pluto finally got on it's way at 7pm tonight. I watched it with the kids on NASA TV. Facinating stuff.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4629486.stm

[Rick]

New Horizons, NASA's Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission is speeding on its way:

As we continue to fly outward from the Sun at 78,700 kilometers (48,600 miles) an hour, our communications time, or RTLT (round trip light time), is increasing rapidly. In fact, it's now approaching an hour and a half round trip, at the speed of light! For that reason, our mission and payload operations team has been working to complete a whole series of activities that are best done now, before the communications time increases still further. Since late September (more here).

[Rick]

The New Horizons probe is bearing down on Jupiter and a flyby that will swing the spacecraft out to Pluto.

The US mission was already the fastest ever launched, but the extra kick from the gas-giant's gravity will ensure it arrives at the dwarf planet by 2015.

So far, New Horizons has taken more than 20 images of Jupiter; hundreds more will have been obtained by the end of a late February flyby.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6279423.stm
Mission: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

[Rick]

Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft has returned stunning views of the Jupiter system captured during a recent flyby.

They include huge volcanic eruptions on the surface of the Io moon, as well as the first close-up look at a burgeoning red storm in Jupiter's atmosphere.

The probe passed within 2.3 million km of Jupiter in a gravity kick manoeuvre to pick up speed as it dashes towards its ultimate target of Pluto.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6613717.stm
And: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

[mickw]

A NASA spacecraft speeding across the solar system has officially covered half the distance of its trip to Pluto and its moons.

On Thursday, NASA's New Horizons probe zoomed past the 1.48 billion-mile (2.39 billion-km) mark, completing half the travel distance between Earth in 2006, when it launched, and where Pluto will be when the spacecraft arrives in July 2015.

"From here on out, we're on approach to an encounter with the Pluto system," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The second half of the journey begins."

New Horizons has been billed as NASA's fastest mission to visit another world. It is zooming across the solar system at about 36,000 mph (nearly 58,000 kph). Next month, it will cross the orbit of Uranus.

More:  The 9th Planet

[mickw]

The discovery of a new moon around Pluto hints that a NASA spacecraft streaking toward the dwarf planet could uncover more surprises when it finally gets there.

The tiny new moon — announced today (July 20) and called P4 for now — brings the number of known Pluto satellites to four. And the find, made with the Hubble Space Telescope, suggests that NASA's New Horizons probe could make some big discoveries, too, when it makes a close flyby of Pluto in 2015, researchers said.

"The discovery of P4 just reinforces what we knew before: This is going to be completely new territory," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "We can't wait."

More:   http://www.space.com/12372-pluto-fourth-moon-nasa-spacecraft.html

Bit more:   More

[mickw]

And in todays APOD : http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110722.html

[Rick]

New Horizons: Is the Pluto System Dangerous?
by Alan Stern
November 7, 2011

New Horizons remains healthy and on course, now almost two times as far from the Sun as the Earth is, and approaching six years into its 9.5-year journey to the Pluto system.

We've taken the spacecraft out of hibernation to perform maintenance activities, and to re-point our radio antenna to compensate for Earth's movement around its orbit. This "hibernation wakeup' started November 5 and will last until November 15. Then New Horizons will hibernate again until early January, when we'll perform a more extensive, almost month-long wakeup.

More: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspective.php?page=piPerspective_11_07_2011

[Rick]

At Pluto, Moons and Debris May Be Hazardous to New Horizons
Spacecraft Aims to Steer Clear of 'Debris Zones' During 2015 Flyby

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is now almost seven years into its 9½-year journey across the solar system to explore Pluto and its system of moons. Just over two years from now, in January 2015, New Horizons will begin encounter operations, which will culminate in a close approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, and the first-ever exploration of a planet in the Kuiper Belt.

As New Horizons has traveled through space, its science team has become increasingly aware of the possibility that dangerous debris may be orbiting in the Pluto system, putting the spacecraft and its exploration objectives into harm's way.

"We've found more and more moons orbiting near Pluto — the count is now up to five," says Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and an associate vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). "And we've come to appreciate that those moons, as well as those not yet discovered, act as debris generators, populating the Pluto system with shards from collisions between those moons and small Kuiper Belt objects."

"Because our spacecraft is traveling so fast — more than 30,000 miles per hour — a collision with a single pebble, or even a millimeter-sized grain, could cripple or destroy New Horizons," adds New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), "so we need to steer clear of any debris zones around Pluto."

More: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20121016.php

[Rick]

The PI's Perspective: Celebrating 35 Years of Charon

This week the New Horizons mission team is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto's largest and "first" moon, Charon. This discovery was made in 1978 by U.S. Naval Observatory astronomers James Christy and Robert Harrington, working in Flagstaff, Ariz., and Washington, D.C.

Charon, whose discovery was first announced on July 7, 1978, orbits about 19,400 kilometers (12,500 miles) from Pluto and has a diameter of about 1,207 kilometers (750 miles) — about the width of Texas. At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest moon relative to its planet in our solar system.

More: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspective.php?page=piPerspective_07_05_2013

[Rick]

Charon Revealed!
New Horizons Camera Spots Pluto's Largest Moon

NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft, using its highest-resolution telescopic camera, has spotted Pluto's Texas-sized, ice-covered moon Charon for the first time. This represents a major milestone on the spacecraft's 9½-year journey to conduct the initial reconnaissance of the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt and, in a sense, begins the mission's long-range study of the Pluto system.

More: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20130710.php

[Rick]

Late in Cruise, and a Binary Ahoy

New Horizons has just completed a summer of intensive activities and entered hibernation on Aug. 20. The routine parts of the activities included thorough checkouts of all our backup systems (result: they work fine!) and of all our scientific instruments (they work fine too!). We also updated our onboard fault protection (a.k.a. "autonomy") software, collected interplanetary cruise science data, and tracked the spacecraft for hundreds of hours to improve our trajectory knowledge. Added to this mix of routine summer wake-up activities for New Horizons were two major activities that had never been performed before.

The first of these, conducted in early July, was planned imaging of Pluto and its largest satellite, Charon. As you can see from the image and caption above, we accomplished this using our LORRI long-focal length camera. Seeing these images, revealing our target as a true planetary binary, viscerally signaled to me that we're nearing our destination and the end of the long, 3-billion-plus mile cruise we set out on back in January 2006.

More in the PI's Perspective, August 23rd 2013.

[Rick]

Cracks in Pluto's Moon Could Indicate it Once Had an Underground Ocean

If the icy surface of Pluto's giant moon Charon is cracked, analysis of the fractures could reveal if its interior was warm, perhaps warm enough to have maintained a subterranean ocean of liquid water, according to a new NASA-funded study.

Pluto is an extremely distant world, orbiting the sun more than 29 times farther than Earth. With a surface temperature estimated to be about 380 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (around minus 229 degrees Celsius), the environment at Pluto is far too cold to allow liquid water on its surface. Pluto's moons are in the same frigid environment.

More here

[Rick]

New Horizons: Childhood's End

New Horizons is now just a few days from emerging from its next-to-last hibernation. The spacecraft has been hibernating about 80 percent of each year since we left Jupiter in 2007, but that will all end in December when we wake up for two years of Pluto encounter and post-encounter data downlink operations.

We began this particular hibernation period back in mid-January; it ends on Father's Day, June 15. When we wake up the bird, she'll be more than 100 million miles closer to Pluto than when we put her to sleep. Although we still have a little more than 300 million miles and a year to go, the mileage and time already traveled account for nearly 90 percent of the total journey - so we are truly in the last stages of the cruise from Earth to the solar system's vast unexplored frontier!

More: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspective.php?page=piPerspective_06_11_2014

[Rick]

NASA's Hubble to Begin Search Beyond Pluto for a New Horizons Mission Target

The Kuiper Belt is the final frontier of our solar system, and also the vastest. Stretching from 3 to 5 billion miles from the Sun, it contains myriad primate icy bodies left over from the birth of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. After passing the dwarf planet Pluto in July 2015, NASA's New Horizons space probe will hurtle deep into the Kuiper Belt at nearly 35,000 miles per hour. The Hubble Space Telescope is being used to search for a suitable Kuiper Belt object that New Horizons could pay a visit to. It would be our first and perhaps last look at such a remote relic from the distant past. The search is very challenging even for Hubble's sharp vision. It has to find something the size of Manhattan Island, as black as charcoal, and embedded against a snowstorm of background stars.

More: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/29/full/