When the New Horizons spacecraft launched in January of 2006, it was aimed at the planet Pluto.
Now it’s just going to Pluto.
Haha! Get it?
Anyway, it’s reached another cool milestone: its sensitive camera has spotted the distant planet object for the first time.
It’s labeled in that image, and yes it’s only a blip (click it for an animation). The images were taken in September over two days. Pluto can be identified among all those stars and cosmic ray hits on the detector because it moves along a path that was predicted using the combination of Pluto’s and New Horizons’ motions. Pluto was over 4 billion kilometers away from the probe when these images were taken. At that distance (if I’ve done my math correctly) Pluto was 0.1 arcseconds across: equivalent to the apparent size of a US quarter seen from 50 kilometers away. That’s tiny. So it’ll get better from here.
New Horizons will fly past Pluto in the year 2015. It doesn’t have the fuel to slow and orbit, so it’ll zip past, take loads of images and other data, and then head on out of the solar system and into interstellar space.
November 28th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
After Deep Impact, I am partial to ramming large celestial objects with space probes. It’s kind of like a flashy version of hitting passing roadsigns with beer bottles. Any chance New Horizons could get a mission redirect?
November 28th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Probably no chances for a mission redirect to impact Pluto or any of its moons. They are hoping that between now and some time before the Pluto encounter, a more distant Kuiper Belt Object will be discovered that is close enough to NH’s flight path for an encounter to be arranged.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Sometimes the scale of things amaze me and this is a great example.
How fast is NH travelling? Considering that it has only been enroute for less than a year but still has another 9 years or so to reach its destination makes our solar system seem pretty big until you compare it with our own island universe and of course the universe itself.
And I wonder why my mind wanders…
Anyway, looking forward to the pictures later on in the mission. How soon before its arrival and how far after its flyby will higher resolution pictures be sent back? Regardless, it’s too far to travel just to smash into something.
Clear skies,
November 28th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
Oh neat!
One day, one day, it’ll be bigger than 5 pixels. I can’t wait to see Pluto, even though some people around me now discards it as something minor. (As if the “planet” title changed its nature.)
November 29th, 2006 at 12:45 am
Am I the only one who supported Pluto’s designation being reduced? I mean, with the discovery of the Kupier objects and other “riff-raff” of the Solar System, it’s so obvious that Pluto is one of them.
There’s no room for sentimentality in science.
I tease. But still. It’s not a planet.
2015. Geez. We need new propulsion ideas really badly. :\ Can’t we get something nuclear going?
November 29th, 2006 at 4:10 am
Quiet Desperation, I, too, supported Pluto’s reclassification (and I also support the New Horizons mission!). Incidentally, it does use nuclear power, of a sort—the radioisotope thermoelectric generator uses the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 to generate electricity.
November 29th, 2006 at 5:11 am
[...] (thanks to the Bad Astronomy Blog) [...]
November 29th, 2006 at 7:24 am
Pity it is cloudy tonight, or I would have gone out to have a look towards Pluto.
Just kidding actually, but I do respect that little probe. Hey, it’s starting to earn its keep already.
Ivan.
November 29th, 2006 at 7:40 am
I’ve just noticed something. The craft is called “New Horizons”. With an ’s’. Plural. Which seems ironic, because where it is going, there are NO horizons, nor even one horizon.
Unless we are talking about an Event Horizon.
Ivan.
November 29th, 2006 at 10:26 am
Well the definition of horizon also means,
the limit or range of perception, knowledge, or the like.
I think it fits well.
Also, the probes passes by Jupiter in approximately 90 days.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Actually, there will be a few horizons. . . Jupiter, Pluto and Charon to name three. Although, as jrkeller says, I think it’s considering a “horizon” to be the limits to our sight, and saying that we’re expanding our mental view to new limits.
Looking at this: , I find myself awed by our ability to send a probe 3 billion miles away, then know where it will be within a thousand miles, and to furthermore setup the trajectory so that both Pluto and Charon will occult the Sun, and to know when it will be within 10 minutes across just over 2 hours starting 10 years from now. They are giving a 1 month window for the start of that 2 hours, but that is still an amazing prediction.
I’m also interested in the plans to do a flyby or two of Kuiper Belt objects, just because that’s cool.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:25 am
Oops, it killed my attempt at a link. It’s on the website Phil links to in his last paragraph with the words “will fly past Pluto in the year 2015″. It’s the second-to-last picture, and you can click it to see a larger, easier-to-read version.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Dr. Gerard K. O’Niell ( of Space Studies Institute fame) said there are at least the equivelant of 3000 planet Earths (in terms of accesible resources) in the Sol system as moons, asteroids, comets, etc. The really nice thing about all these objects is their low surface gravity. We can essentially access all of their materials(except for the larger moons, like Luna) Here on Earth we can only access the top ten miles or so of the mantle.
Gee, I wonder how long it will take humanity to fill up the entire Sol system?
In Fire Fly, as in most space oriented SciFi, we assume we have to have interstellar flight in order to have enough room for a multiplicity of social experiments. In reality, if it took 10,000 years to essentially fill up the earth,(from the advent of farming) it could take 3000 times that long to fill the entire system with free orbiting colonies, moon colonies(both above ground and underground), etc. Can you visualize how many such City States there could be?,,,and how dynamic the potential interactions???
GAry 7
November 29th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Hey, I just noticed, since I had my lastest MicroSoft system update, I no longer get the error page when posting. Phil, did Y’All do something, or do you think it was an interaction with the MicroSoft system?
GAry 7
November 29th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
Anyone else notice the object traveling “south” in the upper left quadrant? Anyone know what it is? It appears to go twice the distance as pluto in the 3 days. Personally I think it’s the UFO from Hale-Bopp.
November 29th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Hey, we’re sending a Plutonium-powered probe to Pluto!
December 1st, 2006 at 8:44 am
Well I think Pluto is a planet & the IAU got it wrong.
That whole “cleared its orbital neighbourhood” business all sounds very fuzzy logic and hard to define and plainbadscience. Cleared it sorbit What about Pluto crossing Neptune? What about trojan asteroids and indeed all the other asteroids and comets that cross all planetary orbits? How far is a neighbourhood? What constitutes cleared?
Pluto’s round, its got an atmosphere, its almost certainly geologically diferentiated, it has three moons -one large and two small, it may have rings (they hope New Horizons doesn’t slam into those!) and oh yeah itdirectly orbits theSunand doesn’t fuse atoms like stars! C’mon its a planet!
Okay its small and its in the Kuiper belt but still – if we found an Earth or even Mars size object there surely we’d have to call that a planet -and by the same reasoning then where do we draw the line? At roundness I say or hydrostatic equilibrium and as was first proposed -so Pluto counts, Eris counts Sedna counts,Ceres counts and so what if we have twenty or thirty or more planets in our system! The more the merrier!
Keep calling Pluto a planet Phil, don’t strike it out. The IAU plain got it wrong and until they correct their error lets just treat their misguided, unscientific and undemocratic “decision” with the contempt it deserves!
Anybody know if they can call an emergy meeting between the scheduled ones and remedy their stuff-up?
Great images and news too thanks.
December 1st, 2006 at 8:58 am
[b]QuietDesperation[/b] Get something nuclear going eh?
What like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island or the China syndrome transfered from fact to fiction? Or like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Yep, just what the planet needs – more great dirty holes in the ground with stacks of pollution, radioactive waste, plutonium on tap for terrorists (incl. government terrorists which some would say include the Good ole US of A ..)
In my nation we are now being told of plans to pour acid into the ground to mine uranium for export and all of a sudden, surprise, surpise, a hand-pcked team of nuclear advocates has recomneded nuclearpower as an answer to the anthropocentric greenhouseeffect. Well if they were talking solar they’d beright. But they’re talking uranium fission sothey aredead wrong.
RTGs for space probes and medical isotopes are one (good) thing.
Generating serious amounts of power through a non-renewable rare fuel, mined at great cost and waste that produces dangerous, mutagenic, carcinogenic, near eternal, highly toxic, highly unstable material tahtcan be used asposions and indirty bombs and H-bombs and A-bombs -well that’s another very bad, very stupid thing.
There are better ways – alternative energy from Sun, wind, tides, geothermal, space radiation, Ocean Thermal System (a la JerryPournelle) et cetera.
Nuclear we don’t need. Its very much cure worse than illness.
December 1st, 2006 at 9:02 am
D’oh! I meant like the China Syndrome transfered from fiction to fact of course!
Sacks of typos as ever .. Man, I wish we could edit in this thing!
Yes that _was_ another hint.
December 3rd, 2006 at 11:25 pm
You can still call it a dwarf planet. People are really missing an opportunity to exhault the dwarves, it is still a pretty exclusive club.
New Horizons is pretty darn cool. I wonder if there’s been any luck finding a KBO to flyby after 2015…I wonder when the deadline is for determining the next stop (no doubt it depends on where they want to go)