Leaving you with Overbye’s words:īeyond the hills are always more hills, and beyond the worlds are more worlds. But until then, be willing to consider the Solar System’s moons, missions to which are less than a decade away. The next frontiers in planetary exploration will be the exoplanets – the closest of which is 4.3 light-years away ( orbiting Alpha Centauri B). Then, there are also post-flyby missions whose results, when pieced together with the July 14 flyby and other observations, will expand our knowledge of Pluto in its larger environment: among the Kuiper Belt, at whose inner edge it resides.įinally, as Dennis Overbye of The New York Times argued in a poignant essay, the Pluto flyby marks the last of the Solar System’s classical planets to explored, the last of the planets the people of our generation will get to see up close. Then, in October, the exoplanet-hunting Kepler telescope, in its second avatar as K2, will start focusing on the changes in brightness off of and around Pluto to deduce the body’s orbital characteristics. From July 23 to July 30, the Spitzer Space Telescope will study Pluto in the infrared, mapping its surface ice. Cassini, from its orbit around Saturn, will take a picture of New Horizons just around the time of its flyby. Complementarily, NASA will also be training the eyes of its Cassini, Spitzer and Kepler space-borne instruments on Pluto. They will reveal how the two bodies evolved in the past, the structure and composition of their interiors, and if – for some astronomers – Charon might’ve harboured a subsurface ocean in its past. Credit: Applied Physics Lab/NASAĪll these details will be thrown up in detail during New Horizons’ flyby. As always, all communications will be via the Deep Space Network – whose Goldstone base is currently all ears for the probe.Ĭharon, annotated. Until then, the best will always be yet to come. ĭownloading the entire science dataset including losslessly compressed observations will take until around November 2016 to complete. Only the optical navigation images are losslessly compressed. Almost all image data returned during the week around closest approach will be lossily compressed - they will show JPEG compression artifacts. Then there will be a hiatus of 8 weeks before New Horizons turns to systematically downlinking all its data. Another batch of data will arrive in the “Early High Priority” downlinks over the subsequent weekend, July 17-20.
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According to Emily Lakdawalla,įollowing closest approach, on Wednesday and Thursday, July 15 and 16, there will be a series of “First Look” downlinks containing a sampling of key science data. The entire data snapped by the probe during the flyby will be downloaded over a longer period of time. NASA has called for a press conference to release the first close-up images at 0030 hrs on July 16 (IST). The timings of various events announced by NASA will have to be adjusted against the fact that New Horizons is 4.5 light-hours away from Earth. That New Horizons survived the flyby will be known when, on early Wednesday morning (IST), it starts to send communication signals Earthward again. Finally, 1 hour and 25 minutes later, it will be in Charon’s shadow to look for its atmosphere. Then, 1 minute and 2 seconds after that, New Horizons will again be in sunlight. Next: 47 minutes and 28 seconds after the Charon flyby, the probe will find itself in Pluto’s shadow where its high-gain antennae will make observations of how the dwarf planet’s atmosphere affects sunlight and radio signals from Earth as they pass through it. During closest approach, Pluto will occupy the entire field of view of LORRI to reveal the surface in glorious detail.įourteen minutes into the Pluto flyby, New Horizons will make its closest approach to Charon, which is about 24,000 km away. The probe’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager ( LORRI) has already been sending better and better pictures of Pluto as it gets closer.
For much of the rest of the day, it will not be communicating with mission control as it conducts observation. The flyby will allow it to capture high-resolution images of the dwarf planet’s surface and atmosphere as well as take a look at its biggest moon, Charon. It’s what the probe set out to do when it was launched in January 2006.
In under seven hours, the NASA New Horizons space probe will flyby Pluto at 49,900 km per hour, from a distance of 12,500 km.
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