Over the course of this week, starting on July 14, we were bombarded with data about an incredibly epic event: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past one of the last frontiers of our solar system, Pluto.
New Horizons is the first spacecraft designed to reach Pluto, and the science it gathers will ultimately rewrite our textbook on this tiny, icy world about which we know so little. The New Horizons mission is unique in many ways and even has a few secrets on board.
Launch of New Horizonsbecame the fastest in history
On January 19, 2006, NASA attached the New Horizons spacecraft to the top of an Atlas V rocket and launched it into space. It was the fastest launch in history, reaching speeds of over 58,000 km/h. Just nine hours after launch, the device had already reached the Moon. It took the Apollo astronauts three days to reach it. The New Horizons probe reached it eight times faster.
When was the New Horizons probe launched?, Pluto was still a planet
When the probe was launched, scientists were already whispering worriedly about Pluto's status among the planets. That's because the Pluto-sized object Eris was discovered in 2005, and astronomers needed to decide whether Eris would become the tenth planet or whether it would be easier to redefine a planet.
Pluto ultimately ceased to be a planet five months after New Horizons launched.
Despite the fact that the New Horizons probe was created for Pluto, it also looked at Jupiter
In 2007, New Horizons conducted an important encounter with Jupiter. The spacecraft needed the powerful gravity of the giant planet, which accelerated the probe like a slingshot towards Pluto. This flyby was successful and accelerated the probe to another 14,500 km/h.
New Horizons probemade the first video of an extraterrestrial volcano eruption
One of Jupiter's moons, Io, is home to more than four hundred volcanoes, making it the most geologically active and driest object in our solar system. As the New Horizons probe approached Jupiter, it took a series of images of Io that revealed volcanic outbursts on the surface.
Taken together, these images made it possible to create the first video of an erupting volcano outside the Earth.
New Horizons carries the ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh
Tombaugh discovered this dwarf planet in 1930, and 67 years later, while dying, he asked to send his ashes into space. NASA placed a handful of his ashes on the top of New Horizons before it launched in 2006. His remains "visited" the planet he discovered. However, Tombo's ashes are just one of a number of secrets aboard New Horizons.
New Horizons proberuns on nuclear fuel
The New Horizons probe flies so far from the Sun that it cannot rely on solar panels to generate power. Instead, its nuclear battery converts radiation from the decay of plutonium atoms into electricity, thus powering its engine and the instruments on board so it can gather as much information as possible.
Such batteries are in short supply. NASA, for example, has enough plutonium left for a couple of these. And they are not going to produce it yet.
There are seven instruments on board New Horizons, two of which are named after characters from the 1950s TV series.
Five of the seven New Horizons instruments are represented by acronyms. Some of them sound familiar like PEPSSI (Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation) and REX (Radio Science Experiment).
Two instruments without acronyms in their names are Ralph and Alice. Ralph will help scientists study the geology and composition of Pluto's surface, while Alice will study Pluto's atmosphere. Ralph and Alice (or Alice) are two main characters in the 50s television series Honeymooners.
All New Horizons toolsoperate with minimal energy consumption, especially the Ralph camera
Although the Ralph camera was built over 10 years ago, it is one of the most sophisticated cameras ever made. It weighs about 10 kilograms and requires the same amount of energy to operate as a small table lamp.
This powerful instrument can reveal features on Pluto's surface up to 60 meters across.
A tiny piece of debris can destroy a device
New Horizons is currently flying through space at 50,000 km/h. If a piece of ice or dust hits it, the spacecraft will be destroyed before it even has a chance to send data back to mission control.
"Even tiny particles the size of a grain of rice could be lethal to New Horizons because we're moving so fast," said Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator.
The mission won't end with Pluto
If all goes well with Pluto, or if New Horizons has enough fuel left, the probe will fly on to study at least one more object in the region of the solar system beyond our planets in the Kuiper belt.
This belt lies at the edge of our solar system and is 20 times wider than the asteroid belt that separates Mars from Jupiter. Astronomers think it may store debris from celestial objects left over from the formation of our solar system.
What have we learned about the outskirts of the solar system?
The New Horizons mission team organized a press conference on July 17, 2015 at 20:00 Moscow time, at which they reported the latest data about Pluto and its system received from the automatic interplanetary station. Scientists discovered an icy plain with unusual geology on the dwarf planet, possible evidence of the presence of winds and geysers on the former ninth planet, and also observed a plasma tail and estimated the size of what turned out to be Pluto’s gigantic atmosphere.
Geology
Scientists presented high-resolution photographs of Pluto's surface. They show interesting geological features dwarf planet- lumpy hills above the plains, ribbed, probably due to erosion, the surface of the ice fields, as well as channels delimiting the ice plains. Particular attention was drawn to the spotted dark stripes on the ice - possible traces of cryovolcanism, geyser eruptions, the same as those observed in 1989 on Neptune's moon Triton.
More and more data is accumulating indicating that geological processes are still actively occurring on Pluto, and not just simple temperature fluctuations and changes in wind speed in its rarefied atmosphere. If the dwarf planet were a calm world, high ice mountains would not form on its plains, but traces would be visible impact craters.
These ice rocks, according to scientists, could have formed a hundred million years ago, and several weeks before the station’s approach to Pluto. Something causes the water ice that mountains are largely made of to rise in defiance of gravity. And scientists did not at all expect to see such a plain as the Sputnik Plateau.
When the New Horizons station flew in the shadow of a dwarf planet, it was possible to analyze its atmosphere. In particular, it was discovered that of its two models - turbulent and calm, most likely the second one corresponds to reality. The data obtained indicate that the wind speed at the surface of Pluto is 1-2 meters per second. This is enough to move the smallest particles of ice.
Wind likely contributes to erosion on Pluto's surface. However, this does not answer the question of how, for example, Mount Norgay was formed, a video of the flight over which was shown by NASA. It is surrounded by an icy plain, and it is unclear how susceptible the mountain is to erosion processes.
The nature of the polygonal channels delimiting segments of the ice plain is also unclear. They could have arisen as a result of cooling and subsequent compression, or formed as a result of convection of matter from the interior of the dwarf planet into its atmosphere.
Scientists were also surprised to discover that the Sputnik Plateau is covered with a layer of ice from carbon monoxide. Its exact thickness is unknown, however, according to available data, it is clearly more than one centimeter. If not much more, then most likely it is an analogue of water snow.
However, it did not necessarily fall from above. Scientists do not rule out that “snow” could have gotten onto the plateau from the bowels of the planet, in particular from geysers. The wind could spread the substance from the geysers evenly across the plateau.
In NASA images published on July 15, a 3.5-kilometer-high mountain is visible on the surface of the dwarf planet. It is located in the middle of a plain, and there are no visible traces of impact craters around. This also indicates active geological processes on the surface of Pluto.
Previously, astronomers believed that high mountains on small celestial bodies (in particular, satellites of giant planets) are formed as a result of their gravitational interaction with larger bodies.
Since there are no such in the immediate vicinity of Pluto, this mechanism does not work for it. This means that it may not work for other bodies in the Solar System.
Scientists believed that active geological processes could not occur in such a distant and cold object as Pluto, which arose billions of years ago. Probably, the source of energy for them is the internal heat released as a result of radioactive reactions in the bowels of the celestial body.
Larry Cederbloom of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff in northern Arizona, who once participated in the Voyager mission, noted the similarities and differences between Pluto and Triton, Neptune's largest moon.
According to the popular point of view, Triton was previously located, like Pluto, in the Kuiper belt, but was then captured by Neptune and became its satellite. On Triton, scientists also suggest the existence of cryovolcanism, but as a source internal heat tidal influence from Neptune is indicated. In addition, Triton, like Pluto, has few craters, but Neptune's moon does not have high mountains.
Atmosphere
The New Horizons station discovered a giant atmosphere and plasma tail near Pluto, but found no signs of a magnetosphere. According to the data obtained, the thickness of Pluto’s atmosphere exceeds 1.6 thousand kilometers. In her upper layers Molecular nitrogen predominates, in low levels - methane and more complex hydrocarbons.
Information from New Horizons was received approximately an hour after the station's closest approach to Pluto. At this moment, the apparatus was in the shadow of the dwarf planet, and its spectrograph recorded changes in the absorption of ultraviolet radiation by molecular nitrogen depending on the illumination of Pluto’s atmosphere by the Sun.
NASA demonstrated this in an animation. On it, sunset occurs south of the “heart” of Pluto (when the station was at a distance of 48.2 thousand kilometers from its surface), and sunrise occurs north of the “tail” of the Whale region (when New Horizons is 57 thousand kilometers away from the dwarf planet ).
Another scientific instrument, 1.5 hours after its closest approach to Pluto, managed to observe a cold plasma tail near the dwarf planet. This is molecular nitrogen (which has enough energy to overcome the weak gravity of a dwarf planet) ionized by ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. In space near Pluto, the solar wind collides with such ions and slows down its movement, and also possibly forms shock wave(marked in red in the figure) and the plasma tail (blue region) of the dwarf planet.
Pluto's atmosphere and plasma tail
All this allowed scientists to determine the rate of loss of matter by Pluto - approximately 500 tons per hour. Mars, for example, only loses a ton per hour. SWAP carried out its observations at distances from 68 thousand to 77 kilometers to the surface of Pluto, within which it discovered a region containing nitrogen ions. The length of the tail, as well as exact type the particles that form it, mission scientists New Horizons hasn't been named yet.
The New Horizons mission has already been considered a success. On it, NASA completes general monitoring of the Solar System and is going to focus on a detailed study of the worlds already visited by automatic interplanetary stations.
Based on materials hi-news.ru, tape.ru
This week, a historic event awaits us - for the first time, an earthly spacecraft will fly past Pluto. The New Horizons probe will be only 12,500 km from the dwarf planet on the afternoon of July 14. But due to the fact that the data transfer rate at such distances will be approximately 1 kilobit per second, data from the probe will be transmitted for months. You won’t be able to watch the flyby of Pluto online, but that’s not a problem. Thanks to a community of enthusiasts, we can fly past Pluto virtually, in the Orbiter space simulator, and get a close-up look at how the event will unfold.
A little materiel
"New Horizons" in the installation and testing complex
The New Horizons probe has an initial mass of 478 kg, of which 77 kg is fuel (hydrazine) and 30 kg is scientific equipment. It is used as a source of electricity with 11 kg of plutonium-238. At the time of arrival at Pluto, the RTG produces approximately 200 W of power. The device is wrapped in a multilayer heat-protective coating (Dacron, Mylar, Kapton), which also serves to protect against micrometeorites, and is heated by the heat generated during the operation of the electronics. To release excess heat into internal regions The solar system has blinds, and if the heat from the electronics is not enough, the automation will turn on the heaters. The probe is equipped with two low-gain antennas (for short-range communications) and one medium and high-gain antenna each. The propulsion system consists of 16 engines, combined in two groups of 8 for greater reliability. In each group, two engines with a thrust of 0.5 kg are used for trajectory correction, and 6 engines with a thrust of 80 grams are used for orientation. The on-board computer has a radiation-resistant processor with a frequency of 12 MHz and an 8 GB solid-state drive. The computer and drive are also duplicated. Two star sensors, two solar sensors (reserve) and two inertial measurement units with gyroscopes and accelerometers are used. The orientation of the device in space is carried out using engines; in the flight mode to the target, the probe is also stabilized by rotation.
There are seven scientific instruments installed on board New Horizons:
- Alice. UV spectrometer. Its task is to determine the parameters of Pluto's atmosphere. In airglow mode, it records what the atmosphere emits in the UV range, and in eclipse mode, when New Horizons passes through Pluto's shadow, it will determine the composition of the atmosphere from the absorption spectrum of sunlight. A modification of this device is also on the Rosetta probe.
- Ralph. Camera and spectrometer for visible and IR ranges. It will give us black and white and color images of the surface and even stereo images for studying topography.
- LORRI. A visible telescope for long-range photography and detailed surface images. Initially they talked about a resolution of 50 m/pixel, now they are calling the figure 100 m, let's see what happens in the end.
- SWAP. Solar wind analyzer. The largest instrument in its class due to Pluto's distance from the Sun.
- PEPSSI. Energy particle spectrometer. It complements SWAP and differs from it in that it can detect particles of much higher energies.
- SDC. Student detector cosmic dust. Records the mass and speed of particles encountered by New Horizons.
- REX. The high-gain antenna will be used not only to communicate with Earth, but also to probe Pluto's atmosphere in the radio range.
Launch
Preparations for the launch and launch were not without troubles. In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Wilma hit Cape Canaveral, damaging the first stage accelerator with debris from the assembly and testing facility gate. The accelerator had to be changed. The first stage fuel tank had to be additionally checked because a similar tank was destroyed during testing. All these incidents moved the start from January 11 to January 17. Every day the ballistic situation worsened, the Earth moved away from the pericenter of its orbit, and more and more fuel had to be spent in order to overcome the gravity of the Earth and the Sun. Less fuel was left for acceleration, and this lengthened the path to Pluto. And a launch after February 2 made gravity assist maneuvers near Jupiter impossible, which would have delayed the mission even further.
On January 17, the start did not take place - strong wind prevented it. On January 18, the probe control center suddenly lost power. On January 19, the launch had to be delayed by 52 minutes due to low clouds, but finally, at 19:00 UTC, New Horizons took off from the ground:
After ~100 seconds, the side boosters of the first stage separated; there were as many as five of them - the heaviest version of the Atlas V launch vehicle was used for launch. Four and a half minutes later, the Russian RD-180 engines on the first stage switched off, and ten minutes later the second stage entered its reference orbit. After a twenty-minute pause, the second stage engine turned on again, and New Horizons reached a speed of 12.4 km/s. Then it was the turn of the Star-48 solid propellant upper stage. The combination of the probe and the upper stage was spun up to 60 revolutions per minute, and after ~80 seconds of engine operation, New Horizons accelerated to 16 km/s relative to the Earth, becoming the first vehicle to reach the third escape velocity immediately from earth's orbit(“Pioneers” and “Voyagers” reached it only after a gravitational maneuver at Jupiter).
Animation of separation from the upper stage and further flight
Flyby of Jupiter
Just a year later, in February 2007, New Horizons flew past Jupiter at a distance of 2.3 million km (about 32 diameters), gaining a “free” 4 km/s due to the gravitational maneuver and shortening the path to Pluto by three years. Scientific instruments were not only tested in a real scenario of the passage of a celestial body, but also collected interesting data. After the end of the Galileo mission in 2003, no one visited the vicinity of Jupiter, and the New Horizons instruments were much better.
The big red spot through Ralph's eyes
Animation of a volcano on Io
Pluto
After Jupiter, New Horizons flew in sleep mode for years. The probe crossed the orbit of Saturn in June 2008, Uranus - in March 2011. Despite the fact that individual instruments began working earlier, the probe fully “woke up” on December 6, 2014. And, starting in January, we get closer and closer photographs of Pluto and its moons:
Pluto. The most recent photo from July 11
The flyby cyclogram is already known, you can view it by downloading the NASA's Eyes application from the official website or by watching the recording on YouTube (better expand to full screen):
And we will look at this flight in Orbiter. For this we need:
- Addon "Pluto and Moons"
- Addon "New Horizons"
- Addon "New Horizons Pluto Encounter"
Launch Orbiter. The script we need is called - New Horizons - Pluto Encounter
Hello Pluto! 
Control keys: 
Pluto in sight: 
the 14 th of July: 
11:11 UTC, Pluto and Charon close-up, to the point closest approach less than an hour. 
11:32 UTC. Will New Horizons take such a photo? 
11:50 UTC (14:50 Moscow time). The point of closest approach is already on the outer side of Pluto’s orbit, from here it will be visible as a sickle. 
12:50 UTC (15:50 Moscow time). We are entering the shadow of Pluto. The Alice spectrometer will be collecting some very interesting data here. 
14:15 UTC (17:15 Moscow time). We enter the shadow of Charon. 
~20 hours UTC July 14th. From the vicinity of this point, New Horizons should send a “call home” signal, meaning that everything went well. On Earth it will be received at approximately 4 a.m. Moscow time. 
Small FAQ
Will there be an online broadcast from the probe?No, it will not. On July 14, the probe will fly almost all the time in radio silence. This is because the antenna and scientific instruments are rigidly attached to the body, and data can either be collected or transmitted to Earth. In addition, the data transfer rate is low, around 1 kilobit per second. In this mode, one LORRI photo will be transmitted for about an hour. Not to mention the fact that the Deep Space Network antennas that work with interplanetary stations are not entirely dedicated to the needs of New Horizons; there are enough stations in the solar system that need to be worked with, and the New Horizons control center is happy if it receives 8 hours of antenna time per day.
What then should we focus on, what events should we expect?
The most important event that the public will know about is the “call home” at around 4 a.m. Moscow time. It will mean that New Horizons did not collide with anything, did not go into safe mode, and no other incidents occurred.
When will there be new unique photos?
Photos of Pluto from the closest approach site are expected to be received on July 15, photos of Charon are expected on the 16th. The first color photos are expected around July 18th. And the transfer of all collected data will take months; it is planned to be completed as early as 2016.
What will happen to New Horizons next?
After the flyby of Pluto, a search for a suitable object in the Kuiper belt will be carried out. The specificity of the trajectory means that a suitable target must be in a very narrow cone, for example, Eris is definitely not suitable as a target.
Was it possible to enter the orbit of Pluto?
“new Horizons” have a speed relative to Pluto of ~13 km/s. The total fuel reserve on the probe is enough to change the speed by ~500 m/s. And if we designed the ship, arbitrarily changing the ratio of parts, then braking on the station’s chemical engines weighing 478 kg would deliver approximately 6 kilograms to Pluto orbit, including the engines that would perform the braking and the tanks where the fuel would be stored.
At the same time, theoretically, a mission to enter Pluto orbit is possible. But she will require:
- Decades for gravitational maneuvers or simply slower movement (to dampen the lower relative speed of Pluto)
- Uses or bundles and ion engines.
- Using a heavier launch vehicle to launch a much larger initial mass into Earth orbit.
Where is Pluto now?
If you look at the sky after midnight and mentally draw a line through Deneb and Altair, then Pluto will be low above the horizon in the constellation Sagittarius. Its magnitude is 14, and Pluto cannot be seen in amateur telescopes.
By tag other publications about virtual space travel.
In preparing the publication we used
One of the most talked about topics of yesterday was the completion of the first part of the New Horizons mission: a probe to Pluto, spending nine years on a 3 billion-mile interstellar journey.
« Paper" found out why events on the other side of the solar system are so important for humanity.
Pluto. Photo taken by New Horizons
New Horizons showed the world what Pluto looks like for the first time
Before the flight of the automatic station to Pluto and the transmission of the first photographs of the dwarf planet to Earth, humanity had never seen it. In a 2010 image from the Hubble Space Telescope, Pluto appeared as a yellow-gray blob. Horizons transmitted the first clear image of the planet to Earth on the morning of July 14, 2015. In the VKontakte community AstroAlert the photograph of Pluto and its satellite Charon was made in color (though based more on imagination than on exact data).
The mission was closely followed not only at the NASA center: all major media outlets wrote about the movement of the automatic station “New Horizons”, including Russian publications. There is even a project where you can monitor the location of New Horizons in real time. Site administrator Igor Tirsky said “ paper» about the importance of the mission on the scale of global space exploration.
The New Horizons mission is as important for the development of science as studying the ocean floor in the Mariana Trench or the rocks of the Kola superdeep well. All this is damn exciting, such information cannot be described in words and given a strictly practical meaning. But this is for now, you never know where the answer will come from. I am sure that we should study everything that surrounds us in all available ways. Because it is important for people to know what is around them, in the solar system, to have an idea of those corners that we have not yet been to. "New Horizons" is relatively inexpensive, but very important mission, which will help us look into the outskirts of the solar system and understand how the cosmic bodies closest to us were formed.
Pluto may be the last planet we'll see new photos of.
The debate about whether Pluto should be considered a planet or not has been going on for quite some time, and now, finally, heavenly body recognized as a dwarf planet.
Be that as it may, the New Horizons mission provided a photograph of the last planet in the solar system, which we did not have before. The New York Times published a sad piece entitled Reaching Pluto, and the End of an Era of Planetary Exploration. Perhaps the flight to Pluto will indeed mark the end of the era of discovery of planets in our solar system for many years to come.
The flight to Pluto is a huge technological achievement
The New Horizons station flew to Pluto for nine years, covering billions of kilometers in outer space. During this time, the control center almost managed to lose the station, managed to guide the probe past clouds of debris and calculate the trajectory of the station’s approach to cosmic bodies, drawing “horizons” along the orbit of Jupiter to give the probe additional acceleration.
Flight trajectory of the New Horizons station
Data from Pluto's surface will allow scientists to better understand the history of the Earth
Based on the data available today, scientists believe that Pluto was formed much earlier than our planet and went through all the same “development” cycles as the Earth before ending up at the edge of the solar system.
The goal of the New Horizons mission is to map Pluto and Charon, study geology and morphology cosmic bodies, studying the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and the rate of its dissipation into the environment, an attempt to find the atmosphere of Charon, creating a temperature map of cosmic bodies and much more. This and other data that scientists will collect from satellites will help them better study the history of our planet.
Now New Horizons is moving towards the Kuiper Belt - a large cluster of asteroids formed from the "residual material" of the Solar System. Scientists assume that the probe will transmit data for about twenty years.
Broadcast
From the beginning From the end
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With this, Gazeta.Ru ends the online broadcast of the approach of the New Horizons probe to Pluto. Thanks to everyone who, together with us, followed the development of events that took place at a distance of almost 5 billion km from our planet and opened a new page in the study of space!
Members of the New Horizons probe crew after the spacecraft's launch. The photo was taken on January 19, 2006.
Now, after passing the point of closest approach to Pluto, the New Horizons probe will transmit the collected data to Earth. This process will begin in August and will take more than a year, since for reasons of economy, the spacecraft (by the way, its size is no larger than the size of a piano) was not equipped with a powerful moving antenna, and to transmit data it will have to turn to our planet every now and then. But even after sending the information, the probe’s mission will not end: scientists are going to send New Horizons to one of the little-studied objects in the Kuiper Belt - a region of the Solar System similar to the asteroid belt, the largest known object of which is Pluto. William MacKinnon, one of the mission members, previously said that the data obtained by the probe "will revolutionize our understanding of how the belt planets behave." The New Horizons mission is scheduled to be completed in 2019.
The world-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking also congratulated the space explorers. In a post on your social page Facebook networks scientist said: “I want to congratulate the New Horizons team and NASA on their historic flight over Pluto. This event is the culmination of a mission that lasted more than ten years. I will eagerly await the new information about our distant neighbor that the New Horizons probe will send.
Is Russia going to implement space projects of similar scale? There is no clear answer to this question. According to the head of Roscosmos Igor Komarov, Russia does not refuse to carry out long-distance space flights and understands the importance of such events: at the end of July 2015, the approval of our country’s “lunar program” aimed at studying the Earth’s satellite is expected. As for longer missions, a lot comes down to issues of funding and prioritization: creating unmanned spacecraft and sending them to the far corners of the solar system costs a lot of money. Igor Komarov argues that in the next few years, our country will prioritize those space research whose results can be used to improve the lives of people on Earth, for example, the development of climate monitoring systems or monitoring emergency situations such as floods or forest fires.
You can read about what humanity knew about Pluto 35 years ago on the archives website of The New York Times. Half a century after its discovery, the most distant planet in the solar system remained a complete mystery to people.
Mission Director Alan Stern said: “The New Horizons team is proud to announce that they have completed the first phase of exploration of the Pluto system. This mission has inspired people around the world, showing what humanity can achieve." Glen Fontaine, project manager, concluded: “After nearly 15 years of planning, construction and flight across the solar system, New Horizons has achieved its goal.”
New Horizons crew members celebrate the successful completion of the first phase of the mission
On Twitter of one of the organizations of the Society for Scientific Research named after. Max Planck appeared updated " family portrait"of all the planets of the solar system, which included the photograph of Pluto taken by New Horizons.
The New Horizons probe moved away from Pluto to a distance of just over 100 thousand km. There are 10 hours and 52 minutes left before the new communication session between the spacecraft and the Earth.
It's not just New Horizons that has been keeping a close eye on Pluto over the past few days. The planet was also captured by another spacecraft, Rosetta, which for the first time in the last 15 months took a break from studying comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and photographed Pluto using the OSIRIS spacecraft. The image was taken from a distance of more than 5 billion km. Experts comment that Rosetta’s task was further complicated by the fact that both the comet and Pluto were surrounded by a dense cloud of gas and dust, which was not at all conducive to filming.
Photos of Pluto taken by the Rosetta spacecraft on July 12, 2015. The blue circle in each photo represents Pluto.
NASA reports: if you are one of the 434,738 people who sent their names to Pluto nine and a half years ago, then on the organization's website you can already print special certificates certifying this fact! Recall that on board New Horizons there is a CD-ROM entitled “Send Your Name to Pluto” with the names of those who wanted to take part in the project and contribute to the study of the planet.
By the way, a radioactive isotope of the metal plutonium called plutonium-238, which was named after the planet being studied by the probe, is the main fuel of New Horizons. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which serves as the main source of energy, contains about 11 kg of radioactive fuel in the form of 72 plutonium-238 oxide pellets. Each tablet is enclosed in a power housing made of iridium and covered with a graphite shell on top of it.
Dennis Overbye, a science journalist for The New York Times, tweets: “Stern (Mission leader Alan Stern. - Gazeta.Ru) says it looks like it's snowing on Pluto." A few weeks ago, New Horizons sent scientists a photograph of Pluto that showed a bright area near the planet's pole. Then the researchers suggested that this region of Pluto could be covered with a kind of “snow” of frozen nitrogen.
Astronaut Scott Kelly aboard the International space station, during a live broadcast from the ISS, stated: “Until now, Pluto has been one of the most unexplored and mysterious planets in the solar system. However, now everything has changed. I looked with excitement at the photographs sent by the New Horizons probe. The entire ISS crew expresses gratitude to the New Horizons team for the great work they have done.”
In the near future, the New Horizons probe is going to look at dark side Pluto, illuminated only by its largest satellite, Charon.
Currently, the NASA website is broadcasting live answers to questions that are asked to experts by both the journalists present in the hall and everyone who is interested in space: you can ask the opinion of NASA scientists on a problem that concerns you using Twitter, using the tag #asknasa.
Eric Berger, a science journalist for the Houston Chronicle, reports that the best photograph of Pluto taken by the New Horizons probe is a thousand times higher in resolution than the images taken by the Hubble telescope!
NASA's new image of Pluto has a resolution 1,000 times higher than the best from Hubble.
— Eric Berger (@chronsciguy) July 14, 2015
The New Horizons probe took its first images of Pluto on September 21-24, 2006, just a few months after launch. The photographs were taken from a distance of 4 billion 200 million km, which demonstrated the ability of the device to take pictures of space objects from very far distances. However, the spacecraft did not only photograph Pluto: a little earlier, on September 4, 2006, New Horizons also managed to photograph Jupiter (from a distance of 291 million km). From February 28 to March 1, 2007, the probe took a joint image of Jupiter and its moon Io, the fourth largest moon in the entire solar system.
The New Horizons probe tweets that it is beginning to analyze data on Pluto's atmosphere collected as it passes the planet.
On the NASA website there was a live broadcast from the hall where scientists from all over the world were waiting for the moment of maximum approach of New Horizons to Pluto. Experts said that today marked the beginning of a new era in space exploration.
A few minutes ago, the mission of the New Horizons probe reached its climax. After almost nine and a half years of flight, the spacecraft reached its target - Pluto - and flew very close to it, at a distance of just over 10 thousand km.
At 14.50 Moscow time, the New Horizons probe passed the point of closest approach to Pluto! Experts from NASA say that history is being made today before the eyes of the whole world.
The New Horizons probe and Pluto are separated by just over 16 thousand km and just under 10 minutes!
Mission director Alan Stern said that over the past 48 hours, scientists have learned many new facts about the composition of Pluto's atmosphere and its surface, in particular that North Pole The planet is covered with methane and nitrogen ice. In addition, it became clear to scientists that the size of the planet is slightly larger than previously assumed: it turned out that Pluto’s radius is 1185 km (the error is 10 km).
Since the New Horizons probe began its mission, 3,462 days, 15 hours and 21 minutes have passed, and only 25 minutes remain until its closest approach to Pluto!
SNEAK PEAK of gorgeous Pluto! The dwarf planet has sent a love note back to Earth via our New Horizons spacecraft, which has traveled more than 9 years and 3+ billion miles. This is the last and most detailed image of Pluto sent to Earth before the moment of closest approach - 7:49 a.m. EDT today. This same image will be released and discussed at 8 a.m. EDT today. Watch our briefing live on NASA Television at: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv The high res pic will be posted on the web at: http://www.nasa.gov. This stunning image of the dwarf planet was captured from New Horizons at about 4 p.m. EDT on July 13, about 16 hours before the moment of closest approach. The spacecraft was 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from the surface. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #pluto #plutoflyby #newhorizons #solarsystem #nasabeyond #science