"That's no dwarf planet! It's a space station!"
Posted on 01/25/2015 3:31:37 AM PST by Citizen Zed
The mission to Pluto is being billed as the last great encounter in planetary exploration.
It is one of the first opportunities to study a dwarf planet up close.
The pictures are critical to enable the New Horizons probe to position itself for a closer fly-by later this year.
As the probe is still 200 million km away, Pluto will be hardly discernable in the images - just a speck of light against the stars.
But the mission team says this view is needed to help line up the spacecraft correctly for its fly-by on 14 July.
"Optical navigation is one of those techniques where we image Pluto repetitively on approach to determine the position of the spacecraft relative to Pluto," explained Mark Holdridge, from the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Baltimore.
"We then perform a number of correction manoeuvres to realign our trajectory with the reference trajectory, thus ensuring we hit our aim point to travel through the Pluto system."
Any initial correction is likely to be made in March.
When New Horizons arrives at Pluto it will be moving so fast - at almost 14km/s - that going into orbit around the distant world is impossible; it must barrel straight through instead.
One complication is that the seven different instruments aboard the spacecraft need to work at different distances to get their data, and so the team has constructed a very elaborate observation schedule for them all.
But what this means is that very precise timing will be required to make sure the flyby runs smoothly.
The closest approach to Pluto is set for around 11:50 GMT on 14 July - at a miss distance of roughly 13,695km from the surface.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.bbc.com ...
Dawn to Ceres, New Horizons to Pluto, Rosetta around a comet. Fun stuff.
Wish we had more of it...
Could. Just looking at the same stuff. The same rocks.
I wish we had more of it too. But really, it’s becoming impractical.
If we are serious of ever, ever traveling outside of the solar system then we should be out there right now. Researching things on Mars, learning how to live on an inhospitable planet. Grow food, filter air, and recycle the same amount of water we went up with, etc.
Because if we don’t the first mission “out there” is going to be a ginormous bust.
And lets not forget that Juno is on its way to Jupiter
I really don’t care what the astronomers say,I still think Pluto is a planet,not a dwarf.
Yeah same here even if that means Ceres is a planet too.
Problem is, if we go by that criteria, we’re looking at, I think 12 or 13 planets in the solar system, with possibilities for more as we keep finding huge objects (That are Pluto++ and approaching Mercury-sized) out in the Kuiper-Belt
I think we should have built a base on the moon and been doing a lot more research into faster propulsion systems.
As long as NASA is on the original mission of exploration (Pathfinding and prospecting) I wish they had the budget of welfare.
Hugh and Ceres Ping.
We’ve should have had a permanent population the moon decades ago. Maybe in the dozens, but still. Especially large telescopes, and definitely a huge radio scope on the far side, shielded from our noise.
There’s absolutely no reason we have not landed on Mars decades ago.
Liberals are absolutely livid that Ted Cruz is now chairman of the committee controlling NASA because he say he’s going to try to get them back on their original mission.
They really believe NASA was intended to study climate change despite the fact that nobody ever mentioned it for the first 30 years.
The moon offers both problems we need to solve like an exceedingly harsh environment and the shelter we need as we solve the problems.
I know. It drives me absolutely nuts.
The moon has enough of a precious resource (gravity) to provide ultraharsh environmental research on survival in said environment.
Its easier to stay on mars but harder to get there. Its harder to stay on the moon but easier to get there. The moon is a great place to research how to make the long duration trip to mars and beyond.
"That's no dwarf planet! It's a space station!"
This mission will prove that it was a full size planet, but somebody deflated it.
You said it. The entire ten-year Apollo Program consumed less money than a single year of WIC/SNAP (inflation-adjusted). And at least the NASA guys and contractors showed up for work and produced something.
When I pointed this out to a liberal-leaning friend of my Mom's, his only response was to splutter a bit and then say, "Don't say things like that." Couldn't deal with the facts, I guess.
NASA should be a Lewis and Clark agency.
Don’t feel bad. I used to hear this little voice that kept trying to convince me that my door was a jar. :-p
There are waiting for the planets Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy to be discovered, before Pluto returns to being a planet.
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