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Lifting the Veil On Pluto's Atmosphere
New submitter Pedro Braganca sends an update on the New Horizons mission to Pluto, now less than four days to closest approach. While we're waiting, NASA has published the best images of Pluto and Charon yet seen. We're starting to be able to make out surface details: A high-contrast array of bright and dark features covers Pluto's surface, while on Charon, only a dark polar region interrupts a generally more uniform light gray terrain. The reddish materials that color Pluto are absent on Charon. Pluto has a significant atmosphere; Charon does not. On Pluto, exotic ices like frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide have been found, while Charon's surface is made of frozen water and ammonia compounds. The interior of Pluto is mostly rock, while Charon contains equal measures of rock and water ice.
A countdown to closest approach is present on the New Horizons mission page, as well as the raw image feed.
Charon is about 750 miles (1200 kilometers) across, about half the diameter of Pluto—making it the solar system’s largest moon relative to its planet.
Sounds like someone at NASA is still not over Pluto not being a planet. Let it go... let it go...
No issues. Read it as "... [dwarf] planet." and everything is ok.
Well Charon isn't a moon anyway. Since the center of gravity between the two isn't within Pluto (or Charon), it isn't a moon. So NASA, of all people, got that wrong too.
A Delta V wouldn't have anywhere near the energy needed to slow it down enough for orbit. Remember that the rocket engine and fuel would be traveling at the same speed as the probe, that's a tremendous amount of kinetic energy.
New Horizons is the fastest object ever launched.
No it is not. Not even close to the fastest object we've ever launched. That honor goes to the Helios-A and Helios-B probes which traveled about 70km/s. Much faster than the 16km/s of New Horizons.
The delta v relative to Pluto is 11 km/s, which is not a whole lot in and of itself. My understanding is that fuel boil-off during the 10 years of transit to Pluto makes it very difficult and expensive to bring along enough fuel for a retro burn to put a spacecraft into orbit around Pluto.
It would have been pretty awesome to have an obiter that could zip around Pluto and Charon and do observations. Maybe next time.