It's showtime for Pluto; prepare to be amazed by NASA flyby

[webfact]

It's showtime for Pluto; prepare to be amazed by NASA flyby
By MARCIA DUNN

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Pluto, reveal thyself, and Earthlings, enjoy the show.

On Tuesday, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will sweep past Pluto and present the previously unexplored world in all its icy glory.

It promises to be the biggest planetary unveiling in a quarter-century. The curtain hasn't been pulled back like this since NASA's Voyager 2 shed light on Neptune in 1989.

Now it's little Pluto's turn to shine way out on the frigid fringes of our solar system.

New Horizons has traveled 3 billion miles over 9½ years to get to this historic point. The fastest spacecraft ever launched, it carries the most powerful suite of science instruments ever sent on a scouting and reconnaissance mission of a new, unfamiliar world.

Guarantees principal scientist Alan Stern, "We're going to knock your socks off."

The size of a baby grand piano, the spacecraft will come closest to Pluto on Tuesday morning — at 7:49 a.m. EDT. That's when New Horizons is predicted to pass within 7,767 miles of Pluto. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will zoom within 17,931 miles of Charon, Pluto's jumbo moon.

For the plutophiles among us, it will be cause to celebrate, especially for those gathered at the operations center at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The lab designed and built the spacecraft for NASA, and has been managing its roundabout route through the solar system.

"What NASA's doing with New Horizons is unprecedented in our time and probably something close to the last train to Clarksville, the last picture show, for a very, very long time," says Stern, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

It is the last stop in NASA's quest to explore every planet in our solar system, starting with Venus in 1962. And in a cosmic coincidence, the Pluto visit falls on the 50th anniversary of the first-ever flyby of Mars, by Mariner 4.

Yes, we all know Pluto is no longer an official planet, merely a dwarf, but it still enjoyed full planet status when New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006. Pluto's demotion came just seven months later, a sore subject still for many.

"We're kind of running the anchor leg with Pluto to finish the relay," Stern says.

The sneak peeks of Pluto in recent weeks are getting "juicier and juicier," says Johns Hopkins project scientist Hal Weaver. "The science team is just drooling over these pictures."

The Hubble Space Telescope previously captured the best pictures of Pluto. If the pixelated blobs of pictures had been of Earth, though, not even the continents would have been visible.

The New Horizons team is turning "a point of light into a planet," Stern says.

An image released last week shows a copper-colored Pluto bearing, a large, bright spot in the shape of a heart.

Scientists expect image resolution to improve dramatically by Tuesday. The 7,767-mile span at closest approach is about the distance between Seattle and Sydney.

New Horizons, weighing less than 1,000 pounds including fuel, has seven instruments that will be going full force during the encounter. It's expected to collect 5,000 times as much data, for instance, as Mariner 4.

"We're going to rewrite the book," Weaver says. "This is it — this is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it."

The team gets one crack at this.

"We're trying to hit a very small box, relatively speaking," says Mark Holdridge, the encounter mission manager. "It's 60 by 90 miles, and we're going 30,000 mph, and we're trying to hit that box within a plus or minus 100 seconds."

The only planet in our solar system discovered by an American, Pluto actually is a mini solar system unto itself. Pluto — just two-thirds the size of our own moon — has big moon Charon that's just over half its size, as well as baby moons Styx, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. The names are associated with the underworld in which the mythological god, Pluto, reigned. New Horizons will observe each known moon and keep a lookout for more.

Scientists involved in the $700 million effort want to get a good look at Pluto and Charon, and get a handle on their surfaces and chemical composition. They also plan to measure the temperature and pressure in Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere and determine how much gas is escaping into space. Temperatures can plunge to nearly minus-400 degrees.

Bill McKinnon, a New Horizons team member from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, expects to see craters and possible volcanic remnants. A liquid ocean and a rocky core may lie beneath the icy shell.

"Anybody who thinks that when we go to Pluto, we're going to find cold, dead ice balls is in for a rude shock," McKinnon says. "I'm really hoping to see a very active and dynamic world."

Pluto has tantalized astronomers since its 1930 discovery by Clyde Tombaugh using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Some of Tombaugh's ashes are aboard New Horizons. His two children, now in their 70s, plan to be at Johns Hopkins for the encounter.

With its tilted, elongated 248-year orbit, Pluto has made it only a third of the way around the sun since its discovery. The amount of sunlight that reaches Pluto is so dim that at high noon it looks like twilight here on Earth. The massive surrounding Kuiper Belt, in fact, is called the Twilight Zone. The New Horizons team has its eyes on a few much smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, and is hoping for a mission extension as the spacecraft continues toward the solar system exit on the heels of NASA's Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.

For now, signals take 4½ hours to travel one-way between New Horizons and flight controllers in Maryland.

New Horizons' science instruments will be cranked up to collect maximum data Tuesday, leaving no time to send back data. In fact, scientists won't be absolutely certain of success until Tuesday night, 13 hours following New Horizons' closest approach, when it "phones home."

It will be Wednesday before the closest of Pluto's close-ups are available for release. And it will be well into next year — October 2016 — before all the anticipated data are transmitted to Earth.

"We're all going to have to be patient," urges deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin.

For everyone involved, this is a mission of delayed gratification.
___

Online:

NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/

Johns Hopkins University: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/


-- (c) Associated Press 2015-07-13

[empireboy]

Pluto hasn't had this much attention since Mickey Mouse first came on the scene!

[SOTIRIOS]

...too bad they overlook the moons of the great planets...which some suggest are, in fact, inhabited.....

[anon467367354]

...too bad they overlook the moons of the great planets...which some suggest are, in fact, inhabited.....

That is exactly why they don't do it. They have to keep the "humans are special agenda" running as long as they can

so as to keep the sheep that are controlled by the church in line.

It would be interesting to see what is on Pluto though.

[Usernames]

...too bad they overlook the moons of the great planets...which some suggest are, in fact, inhabited.....

That is exactly why they don't do it. They have to keep the "humans are special agenda" running as long as they can

so as to keep the sheep that are controlled by the church in line.

It would be interesting to see what is on Pluto though.

Have you been listening to Georgio Tsoukalos?

[boomerangutang]

Some uplifting news for a change. I'll be a Plutophile. I've been called worse.

[jobsworth]

Such a pity that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will only fly by Pluto and not go into orbit around Pluto. The problem seems to be that to get there within a human lifetime a very powerful rocket, the American Atlas 5 fitted with the Russian RD180 engine, was needed. It would require another powerful rocket to slow it down ond go into Pluto orbit insertion. More weight and hence more expense. Let us just hope that all goes well and the cameras are working well for the few days viewing we will get after 9 1/2 years. The cameras worked well for the dress rehersal, the fly by of Jupiter.

[faraday]

No doubt some of the learned gentlemen on TV could do so very much better.

I'm quite excited about this....seems a long time ago that my father & I made spaceships out of waste paper bins.

He showed me about the planets & constellations on frosty nights in the uk.

[steve654]

...too bad they overlook the moons of the great planets...which some suggest are, in fact, inhabited.....

That is exactly why they don't do it. They have to keep the "humans are special agenda" running as long as they can

so as to keep the sheep that are controlled by the church in line.

It would be interesting to see what is on Pluto though.

Well now, my faith is restored by yours and gr8fldanielle's post. There are open minded people in this forum after all. Goes for the moons on Jupiter too that are probably inhabited. A scientist suggested this even over 100 years ago and most people are still living in the box today.

[Chicog]

Meanwhile they are busy hiding Planet X.

[faraday]

Thought a couple of times about starting a thread on UFO's....but I imagine that some 'realists' would post acerbic & meaningless comments.

Anybody look at 'UFOLou' on yt.....seriously fascinating?

[Somtamnication]

I am super excited to see the planet, finally.

[faraday]

I am super excited to see the planet, finally.

Wonder if Uranus is more exciting?

[steve654]

Thought a couple of times about starting a thread on UFO's....but I imagine that some 'realists' would post acerbic & meaningless comments.

Anybody look at 'UFOLou' on yt.....seriously fascinating?

Would be fun but the sheeple will blow the thread apart by insisting that in this vast universe, only planet earth has life.

[bdenner]

The technology is spectacular. Only too bad we, as humans, have too spend so much on destroying each other rather than research of this and other development natures!

[Tywais]

[Tywais]

An interesting read on communication to/from New Horizons.

Talking to Pluto is hard! Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2015/01/30 15:53 UTC

Topics: New Horizons, mission status, explaining technology

As I write this post, New Horizons is nearing the end of a weeklong optical navigation campaign. By taking photos of the Pluto system at regular intervals, New Horizons' navigators can precisely measure the observed positions of Pluto and its moons with respect to background stars, and determine the spacecraft's position. The last optical navigation images in the weeklong series will be taken tomorrow, but it will likely take two weeks or more for all the data to get to Earth. Two weeks! Why does it take so long? It's not like it's all that much data: 10 full-resolution LORRI images per day.

The short answer to that question is: Pluto is far away -- very far away, more than 30 times Earth's distance from the Sun -- so New Horizons' radio signal is weak. Weak signal means low data rates: at the moment, New Horizons can transmit at most 1 kilobit per second. (Note that spacecraft communications are typically measured in bits, not bytes; 1 kilobit is only 125 bytes.) Even at these low data rates, only the Deep Space Network's very largest, 70-meter dishes can detect New Horizons' faint signal.

How much data is in a single LORRI image? (LORRI, which stands for Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, is New Horizons' highest-resolution camera.) LORRI's detector is 1024 pixels square. Like many modern space cameras, when the camera reads out its detector, it digitizes each pixel as a 12-bit number. Twelve million is an awful lot of bits, but fortunately LORRI's images are amenable to lossless compression, especially now when they contain mostly black space; they can be zipped up to about 2.5 Megabits without any loss of detail. They can be made even smaller with lossy JPEG compression, but for optical navigation, precision counts; the pictures have to be returned losslessly.

So, do the math. 2.5 Megabits, at 1 kilobit per second: it takes 42 minutes to return one LORRI photo to Earth. Most communications sessions last about eight hours. That's eleven images per communications session. And that assumes that New Horizons is transmitting only LORRI data, which it's not; there are other science instruments and spacecraft housekeeping data, too. The Deep Space Network has only three 70-meter dishes, and there is a lot of competition for time on them; New Horizons is lucky to get one communications session per day. And while New Horizons is pointing its dish at Earth, it can't point at anything else, including Pluto. It has to choose between communicating and taking data.

Full article here - planetary.org

[Tywais]

What it looked like to us back then and now. Pretty amazing.

[Tywais]

Pluto is alive—but where is the heat coming from?

Towering mountains of water ice rise up to 3500 meters tall on Pluto, above smooth plains covered in veneers of nitrogen and methane ice, NASA’s New Horizons team announced today. The discovery, along with the finding that parts of the dwarf planet’s surface are crater-free and therefore relatively young, points to a place that has been geologically reworked in the recent past. “It could even be active today,” said John Spencer, a New Horizons team member at Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado, at a press conference today at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

The team also showed off new images of unexpectedly smooth surfaces on Pluto’s moon Charon—which, without an atmosphere, was expected to have an even more battered surface than Pluto. Radioactive elements in both bodies’ interiors could provide some of the heat needed for geological mountain building or ice flows that repave the surface. But Pluto, and especially Charon, are far too small for this heat to persist. The giant impact thought to have formed the two worlds could also provide a source of energy, but that probably happened billions of years ago.

Mountains of water ice rise up from the surface of Pluto, in images released today by NASA's New Horizons mission.

More details here - news.sciencemag.org