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With New Horizons Spacecraft a Year Away, What We Know About Pluto

Posted by samzenpus on from the where-the-mi-go-and-the-terran-federation-play dept.

An anonymous reader writes In one year, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto after over 8 years of travel. "Not only did we choose the date, by the way, we chose the hour and the minute. And we're on track," says Alan Stern, the principal investigator for NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission. As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to Pluto, we will begin getting the clearest images we've ever gotten. "A great deal of planning went into this mission. But in case you're wondering, the New Horizons team did not plan for Pluto to be downgraded to a dwarf planet in the same year as the launch. That didn't change anything for Alan Stern. Some planetary scientists still dispute Pluto's planet status, and Stern says he'll always think of Pluto as a planet. Either way, it's a distant realm ripe for exploration. Scientists don't know exactly what they will see there. And that's the exciting part. 'When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature,' Stern says."

8 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. We know it's a Goddamned planet by sandbagger · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who wants to fight?

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    ---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
    1. Re:We know it's a Goddamned planet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You know, it's funny, as someone who grew up with nine planets including Pluto, I never understood this desire to keep Pluto a planet. Even an elementary school student could see it was a bit of an oddball compared to the other eight, with a highly eccentric and tilted orbit, a dimunitive size, and recurring announcements every few years of possible discovery of other tiny planet like things out in a similarly distant orbit. I was almost relieved when it was got a new categorization. Unless you're somehow tied to the idea of "nine" as being a special number for our count of planets, but even then, discovering new planets would have changed that number anyway, just in an upwards direction.

      But either way, sending a probe to Pluto is just as exciting, now matter what Pluto's classification. I think it would be at least as amazing if we sent one to Eris, or even a random asteroid.

    2. Re:We know it's a Goddamned planet by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Funny

      yes. hundreds of thousands of minor planets. 5 dwarf planets AND EIGHT FULL FLEDGED PLANETS.

      And, of course, once we start naming Dwarf planets, will want Elf planets, Hobbit planets, Orc planets, etc...

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    3. Re:We know it's a Goddamned planet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      You must have a really out-of-date source for your sizes. Mercury is 2440 km, you got that correct. Pluto is a less-than-half 1184 km. 5 moons, including our own, are larger than Pluto and smaller than Mercury.

      Size is most definitely one of the points here.

    4. Re:We know it's a Goddamned planet by Talderas · · Score: 5, Funny

      Even better.

      New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006 to the planet Pluto. Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet on August 26, 2006.

      New Horizons lost its destination within a year as the planet Pluto no longer exists.

      --
      "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
  2. Four hour transit time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Right now the astronomers on the ground are rehearsing everything about the encounter, because it takes four hours for any signal to reach New Horizons and even longer to transmit anything at 1kb/s. The entire Pluto flyby will be automated: they do not have any control over what the spacecraft will see or be able to focus on at the moment of its closest approach to Pluto. The sheer number of things that have to happen at precisely the right time on this mission is insane. It's a good thing they've had a decade to pepare for this.

  3. Re:Anyone have Cliff Notes? by clovis · · Score: 5, Funny

    What do they expect to find on such a distant clump of rock and why is it they thought it to be a good investment to go snap a few slefies around it rather then use that money to go where things really ought to be interesting like Io and Europa?

    Please return your 4-digit ID.

  4. Re:Anyone have Cliff Notes? by Rolgar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think this was a more time sensitive mission, because Pluto is moving farther from the sun and scientists warned (rightly or wrongly) that it was about to freeze, and they had a window to use a gravity assist from Jupiter to get the probe there much sooner, and there was also an earlier mission snowballed.

    On the other hand, Io and Europa aren't going to be any different in 5 years than they would have been a few years ago when the probe would have reached those destinations, so those missions were not as high priority than the potential impact of Pluto's orbit that they weren't sure of when they green-lighted this mission 13 years ago.