Graphic showing New Horizons’ busy schedule before and during the flyby. Credit: NASA
Posted on 07/12/2015 8:05:51 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Edging within 7,800 miles of its surface at 7:49 a.m. EDT, the spacecraft’s long-range telescopic camera will resolve features as small as 230 feet (70 meters). Fourteen minutes later, it will zip within 17,930 miles of Charon as well as image Pluto’s four smaller satellites — Hydra, Styx, Nix and Kerberos.
Graphic showing New Horizons’ busy schedule before and during the flyby. Credit: NASA
fter zooming past, the craft will turn to photograph Pluto eclipsing the Sun as it looks for the faint glow of rings or dust sheets illuminated by backlight. At the same time, sunlight reflecting off Charon will faintly illuminate Pluto’s backside. What could be more romantic than Charonshine?
Six other science instruments will build thermal maps of the Pluto-Charon pair, measure the composition of the surface and atmosphere and observe Pluto’s interaction with the solar wind. All of this will happen autopilot. It has to. There’s just no time to send a change instructions because of the nearly 9-hour lag in round-trip communications between Earth and probe.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
PING
New Horizons Pluto Approach - Flyby Phase Simulation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f19tTPlUoqc
NASA | Tracking Space Weather for New Horizons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZh7RSAhH_Q
Detailed Preview of Pluto Flyby with Hal Weaver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX_vO9Rc-UM
Why do all these articles spell the moon astrologers refer to as “Chiron” as “Charon?”
What size is Pluto in comparison with Earth?
smaller than our moon I think
It’s about 1/5 smaller than our moon.
A nice tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto in 1903. A small container of his cremated remains is attached to the space craft. I suppose it will head on into interstellar space after the fly by.
Wow!
A fitting tribute.
Wow!
Obama didn’t build that.
The space craft launched in January, 2006. Now, 9 1/2 years later it has arrived on target. And, apparently everything aboard still works. What an incredible engineering marvel.
Because astrology is complete bollocks and astrologers don't have the slightest clue of what they're talking about.
And yet it has four satellites. Size really doesn't matter!
Thanks for the links. I never would have found them!
I don’t get it. How does this help Muslims feel good about themselves?
Tombaugh was an interesting guy. I was a member of the Astronomical Society of Las Cruses. When I joined in the early 90’s I had no clue he was a member. He gave several talks as I recall one was about the Laborious drawings of Mars he made using the Lowell Telescope, the one he used to find Pluto. He showed us all his drawings during his talk. It was amazing for its time back then. Sat next to him at some other events, It always brought a smile to my face to see him sporting his Walt Disney Pluto watch.
Cue the "Final Jeopardy" theme music... extra to APoD.
Lol
FYI, Chiron in astrology refers to a comet, or planet [sic] discovered in 1977; in astronomy it is a Centaur asteroid/minor planet/comet (it brightens when nearer the Sun), the first of the Centaurs to be discovered. Another online source for astrology states that Chiron was originally a star in the constellation of Centaurus, probably that’s the source of the astronomers’ name for that family of asteroids?
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