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Best photograph of Pluto (13 July 2015) from the New Horizons mission
MISSION SUMMARY New Horizons: The First Mission to the Pluto System and the Kuiper Belt. The New Horizons mission will help us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt – a relic of solar system formation.
LATEST NEWS- 14 July 2015 - NH is just slightly past its closest flyby to Pluto, taking the highest quality photograph of the planet (see photo above)
- NH will soon be taking detailed photographs of Pluto's moons, starting with Charon
- It will take 16 months from now to download all data from the Pluto flyby
IMPORTANT LINKS Main website: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html APL website: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ About the NH payload: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/Payload.php NASA Instagram: https://instagram.com/nasa/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasanewhorizons
MISSION DETAILS New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006; it swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, and will conduct a five-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015. Pluto closest approach is scheduled for July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft is expected to head farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine one or two of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.
Sending a spacecraft on this long journey will help us answer basic questions about the surface properties, geology, interior makeup and atmospheres on these bodies.
The National Academy of Sciences has ranked the exploration of the Kuiper Belt – including Pluto – of the highest priority for solar system exploration. Generally, New Horizons seeks to understand where Pluto and its moons “fit in” with the other objects in the solar system, such as the inner rocky planets (Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury) and the outer gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).
Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, belong to a third category known as "ice dwarfs." They have solid surfaces but, unlike the terrestrial planets, a significant portion of their mass is icy material.
Using Hubble Space Telescope images, New Horizons team members have discovered four previously unknown moons of Pluto: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos.
A close-up look at these worlds from a spacecraft promises to tell an incredible story about the origins and outskirts of our solar system. New Horizons also will explore – for the first time – how ice dwarf planets like Pluto and Kuiper Belt bodies have evolved over time.
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I love Space and Space exploration. Why are we not funding this?!
But my favorite planet/celestial body is still Neptune
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Anybody know if they will get funding to swing by a Kuiper Belt body or if they will just let it go to waste after going out there?
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Funding to a first target in the belt next year, I don't see why not. Funding with a full scale team for the 10 years it will take to go through the belt ... will depend on how well they sell it.
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I keep on expecting to see it white not dirty brown color.
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Thank you science for continuously pushing the boundaries of what we can know and understand and discover in our universe.
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So far the system seems more interesting than anyone expected. Both Pluto and Charon show signs of geology, young terrain, mountains, ridges ... which is not what you would have expected from such small icy bodies without many sources of internal heat - icy moons of big planets have at least tidal forces, but Pluto-Charon system is tidelocked already with no external torque to help.
This is the moment when we start to regret that the probe is not an orbiter.
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United States24339 Posts
On July 16 2015 03:59 MysteryMeat1 wrote: Can we explore Uranus? NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Uranus on January 24, 1986. Voyager 2 discovered ten previously unknown moons, studied the planet's cold atmosphere, and examined its ring system, discovering two new rings. It also imaged Uranus' five large moons, revealing that their surfaces are covered with impact craters and canyons.
Further missions have not been approved.
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I kinda wanna see Nasa doing some crowdfunding, just to see how much would come out of this.
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Well the craft flies on without any funding. They don't really need a lot of money to keep it hibernated and then to make a course correction once every couple of years; even the flyby is possible with a rather small budget and it will be likely done no matter what. The DSN antenas already exist and are not going anywhere either.
As for other projects, the money needed to actually build nad launch a craft are so insane that anything you could crowdfund will really be peanuts. I always stare in awe how expensive is a single space probe compared to some totally groundbreaking worldwide projects in my research area.
edit: crowfunding was a rather funny typo
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Question!
They say it will take about 16 months for all the data to arrive. Does it means that the data is 'floating' in space right now? And even if something were to happen to New Horizons, the data would still reach Earth? Sorry if my question is ridiculous
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On July 16 2015 07:13 XenOmega wrote:Question! They say it will take about 16 months for all the data to arrive. Does it means that the data is 'floating' in space right now? And even if something were to happen to New Horizons, the data would still reach Earth? Sorry if my question is ridiculous
No, the travel time for the data is only about 5 hours. The data is stored at New Horizons, it will only take so long to download them becasue the speed of the link is worse than an early 2000's modem even when using some of the largest radio dishes on Earth.
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NASA says the lack of craters indicates that is less than 100 million years old meaning that Pluto surface could still be active :O
+ Show Spoiler +
First detailed closeup of Pluto, at 0.4 km/pixel.
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On July 16 2015 05:40 opisska wrote: So far the system seems more interesting than anyone expected. Both Pluto and Charon show signs of geology, young terrain, mountains, ridges ... which is not what you would have expected from such small icy bodies without many sources of internal heat - icy moons of big planets have at least tidal forces, but Pluto-Charon system is tidelocked already with no external torque to help.
This is the moment when we start to regret that the probe is not an orbiter. This whole thing with NASA sending a spacecraft to Pluto has really shown how people underestimate how difficult space travel is. NASA basically took something the size of a piano, chucked it through space, and managed to get it to go between Pluto and it's moon, after piggybacking on Jupiter to speed it up along the way. Pluto is a fucking tiny target with respect to our solar system, and insanely far away.
Imagine setting up a golf ball on a golf course and hit a hole in one at a distance of over 9km, while bouncing it off of something first. Alternatively, it would be like hitting a bulls-eye on a dartboard at a distance of over 1km while bouncing off of something first. That is basically the degree of difficulty involved in the challenge that NASA had to overcome in order to do what they just did. It's absolutely incredible. Getting into orbit is even more challenging, to the point where it simply can't be done right now.....
The problem with orbiting is that you basically have to get yourself to the planet, and then change your velocity to roughly match the planet you're trying to orbit. Even a highly elliptical orbit requires a huge change in velocity when you're talking about the type of speed the orbiter would need in order to reach Pluto in a relatively short period of time. Basically, it took an entire rocket worth of fuel to speed it up to the point where it could reach Pluto in 10 years (including a piggyback with Jupiter), so you would essentially need another whole rocket to slow it down to get into orbit. But to have an entire rocket worth of fuel sped up to that kind of speed, you'd need an even bigger rocket to bring all that fuel up to the same speed. It quickly becomes impractical to launch these types of missions, sadly.
One way to slightly get around that is to plan your path to Pluto so that you essentially come up behind it, or have it creep up on you slowly at the end of your journey, in order to greatly reduce the delta V (change in velocity) needed to obtain an orbit. This requires much, much less fuel at the end to obtain an orbit of some fashion, but the downside to this is that the path you take to get to a planet as far away as Pluto would take several times as long to get there..... At minimum..... Even if it was launched today, none of us would likely be around still when it finally gets into orbit..... You would need to ensure that the technology of the probe would be capable of lasting a century or more, which also makes it so much more difficult to pull off as well.
Basically, there is no realistic way to get an object into orbit around Pluto. At least, with current technology..... It's one thing to do it for Mars or Venus, because they are relatively close to Earth and actually travel at relatively similar speeds, and also putting something into orbit around one of the gas giants is also much easier because they have a lot stronger gravity that can hold something in place easier. Pluto is a bitch though.
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I don't know why, but I didn't expect Pluto to be that color.
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On July 16 2015 00:32 Yurie wrote: Anybody know if they will get funding to swing by a Kuiper Belt body or if they will just let it go to waste after going out there? Pluto IS a Kuiper Belt body
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love science and astronomy, and I say this as a government major who has no idea what half of this stuff means in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately I think we were all born a hundred or two hundred years too early for the mind blowing aspects of space hopefully i'm wrong!
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