Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
After a journey of more than eight years, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has finally entered the first of several planned approach phases around Pluto, and these will culminate with a historic first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet this summer.
According to a statement by Jim Green, director of the US space agency’s Planetary Science Division in Washington DC, “NASA’s first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankind’s first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system. The New Horizons team worked very hard to prepare for this first phase, and they did it flawlessly.”
New Horizons, which lifted off in January 2006, woke up from its final hibernation period last month after a voyage of more than three billion miles, NASA officials said. It will pass close to Pluto in the near future, travelling inside the orbits of its five known moons, and will complete its long-awaited flyby on July 14.
To prepare for that encounter, which will take place 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the mission’s science, engineering, and spacecraft operations teams configured the probe for distant observations of Pluto’s system. The teams started with a long-distance photo shoot using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument on January 25.
“We’ve completed the longest journey any spacecraft has flown from Earth to reach its primary target, and we are ready to begin exploring,” explained Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
According to NASA, LORRI is scheduled to take hundreds of pictures of Pluto over the next several months, helping to fine-tune current estimates of the distance between New Horizons and Pluto. While the dwarf planet’s system will appear to be nothing more than little bright dots in the camera’s view until May, the data will help navigators program course-corrections.
The first such maneuver could take place as early as March, they said.
“We need to refine our knowledge of where Pluto will be when New Horizons flies past it,” explained Mark Holdridge, New Horizons encounter mission manager at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
“The flyby timing also has to be exact, because the computer commands that will orient the spacecraft and point the science instruments are based on precisely knowing the time we pass Pluto – which these images will help us determine,” he added. This will be the first time that images from New Horizons will be used to help pinpoint Pluto’s location.
The first approach phase will last until spring, and during its approach, the spacecraft will be also be involved in several other scientific research projects. According to NASA, its instruments will collect continuous data on the interplanetary environment where the planetary system orbits, including measurements of the high-energy particles streaming from the sun and dust-particle concentrations in the inner reaches of the Kuiper Belt.
More extensive studies of Pluto will begin in the spring, when cameras and spectrometers on board New Horizons will being providing higher-resolution images than those that can be taken on Earth.
Eventually, the probe will be able to obtain photos with quality high enough to map Pluto and its moons more accurately than previously possible. It will even explore the outer region of the solar system and the thousands of Pluto-like small, icy planetoids believed to be there.
Who knows, maybe it will find a wormhole to other universes!
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