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New Horizons
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mickmackey1 wrote: »Or they could be 70 light years away watching WW2 unfold and planning a response. The permutations are endless really.
Reminds me of this Twilight Zone story.
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namloc1980 wrote: »Why would it be a bland blue ball?
Roughly 14km/s or 50,000 km/h. Literally blink and you'd miss it!
Not really literally.
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Some info on a planned digital record of Earth to be uploaded to New Horizons can be found at http://www.oneearthmessage.org/ ... they have to wait until all the encounter data is downloaded before the proposed archive can be transmitted back to the spacecraft. A nice summary of the idea is at http://www.space.com/26332-nasa-new-horizons-one-earth-message.html
There is a CD on-board New Horizons containing about 435,000 names. See http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/searchName.php for info. Hoping my name will be plucked in the aliens lottery to win a shiny new Starstrider spacecraft during the Galactic-Millions draw
No sign of any LORRI images yet from NH. They started the long-range imaging a few days ago but I was expecting to some announcement by yesterday. These pictures will be used to further refine the spacecraft's trajectory but a nominal course change will probably not happen until late-March.
It's critical the course through the Pluto system is plotted as accurately as possible. Because the fly-by speed is so high and targeting of the cameras is programmed in advance, they have to be sure Pluto and the moons are actually in the camera fields of view at the right time. If the timings are off then they could be imaging blank space!
There is high confidence (better than 97%) that there is no risk to NH from debris in the Pluto system. Engineers fired particles at the mock-up vehicle to simulate collisions and discovered NH is actually quite robust. There are other planned flyby trajectories if any risks are found over the next few months. The worst case scenario is to pass well outside the Pluto system altogether -- in this situation there won't be much detail in the pictures. Another alternative is fly even closer to Pluto and actually skim through its upper atmosphere. That said, it looks like the original trajectory is the one they'll use.
I'm guessing Pluto will look very similar to Neptune's moon Triton, an object believed to have originated from further out and then captured by Neptune. Our only close-up view of Triton so far has been with pictures returned by Voyager 2 in August 1989. However, as Alan Stern (PI on New Horizons) says, all our preconceptions to date of what we've expected to see during spacecraft encounters have been completely turned upside down. Who would have though Jupiter's moons would have boasted the most volcanically active world in the Solar System (Io)?
Don't forget DAWN's encounter with Ceres when it arrives at that world in early March. The spacecraft will initially orbit Ceres at a height of about 4,400km and lower that to about 375km in late-2015.
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Really looking forward to the Pluto encounter too.
To quote Alan Stern again, this is like the first missions to Mars or Venus when we had no idea what to expect and were wowed by the results. BBC correspondent Jonathan Amos nicely puts it when he says that for those of us who grew up with nine planets, the mission to Pluto completes the set.Imagine standing on pluto....you'd need thermal insoles thats for sure!
I saw somewhere the Sun shines only 1/10,000 as bright at Pluto as for us on Earth. The view is approximately equivalent to standing at the south pole with the landscape illuminated only by the Full Moon (or maybe the top of one of our snow-capped hills with current weather conditions in some parts of the country!)
The engineering and navigation are a triumph too. To be able to launch a spacecraft from Earth and reach an object billions of kilometres away nine years later with such precision really is amazing. Spaceflight has become so routine now that we expect interplanetary and lunar missions to succeed like that whereas in the 1960s more than a few sailed by their intended targets by a large margin.
Keep an eye on Emily Lakdawalla's blog at http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/ for updates on planetary missions.
A great talk by Mike Brown (he of the @plutokiller twitter handle
) is in the series at http://www.astrosociety.org/education/past-silicon-valley-astronomy-lectures/ ... Mike's talk was given in January 2011 and all the lectures in the series can be downloaded as MP3s for listening to offline.
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the_monkey wrote: »out of curiosity how did you calculate that ?
Very much back of the envelope maths. Escape velocity for Pluto is 1.229 km/s, you'd need a relative velocity lower than this to get into any kind of orbit (well, apart from an escape orbit of course).
So, let's take 1.2 km/s (which is still might too fast for any kind of orbit that doesn't end with you crashing into Pluto, but feck it). According to NASA, New Horizons will pass Pluto with a relative velocity of 49,600 km/h, which is 13.77 km/s (49,600 / 60 / 60).
13.77 / 1.2 = 11.4. 0 -
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Titus Andronicus wrote: »Great time lapse of Pluto & Charon
nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh_zoom_bary_03-final.gif
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ9Ar_B_jy8
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