New Horizons probe eyes Pluto for historic encounter

bbc ^ | 1-25-2015 | Jonathan Amos

[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.

[ExCTCitizen]

The Patriots did...

[fieldmarshaldj]

Has it visited Uranus ?

[Steve0113]

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