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Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Ends Hibernation To Start Mission
An anonymous reader writes NASA's New Horizons spacecraft awoke from hibernation on Saturday and sent a radio confirmation that it had successfully turned itself back on one and a half hours later. The spacecraft has been traveling for nine years across the solar system towards its destination, Pluto. From the article: "In 2006, with New Horizons already on its way, Pluto was stripped of its title as the ninth planet in the solar system and became a dwarf planet, of which more than 1,000 have since been discovered in the Kuiper Belt. With New Horizons approaching Pluto's doorstep, scientists are eager for their first close-up look at this unexplored domain."
The article confuses Kuiper Belt Objects (more than one thousand discovered), and dwarf planets. To quote Wikipedia: "The IAU recognizes five bodies as dwarf planets: Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake".
2015 will be a great year for looking at two of these. As well as New Horizons, there is also the Dawn probe on its way to orbit Ceres.
As well, it has not been in hibernation for 9 years as the summary may mislead, it wakes up (or is awake? not sure) for a total of ~50 days a year to do stuff.
From the Wikipedia timeline table:
Feb 2015 -- Observations of Pluto begin
5 May 2015 -- Better than Hubble -- Images exceed best Hubble Space Telescope resolution.
14 Jul 2015 -- Flyby of Pluto, Charon, Hydra, Nix, Kerberos and Styx
Will this give us some higher resolution photos of the surface to ogle over?
That's the plan.
It is true that we have yet not had high resolution photography of pluto?
Yes.
What is currently known about Plutos composition and is this mission planned to refine knowledge on that?
We know the approximate sizes of Pluto and its moon Charon, their weights (somewhat more accurately, mostly thanks to the fact that Pluto has a heavy moon and Kepler has a third law - without the moon, we'd be screwed!), some surface spectra have been measured (methane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen), and we know that Pluto has a very thin atmosphere that's going to freeze very soon. That's about it...
Ezekiel 23:20
it might have originated in the Kuiper belt, but it isn't there any more.
It never left it, it is still there. It is practically the definition of the belt's location in some cases, with its orbit spanning 30-50 AU which is the definition of the Kuiper belt region to some authors.