After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tues, 7,750 miles above the surface – roughly the same distance from NY to Mumbai, India – making it the 1st-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
“New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away. As New Horizons completes its flyby of Pluto and continues deeper into the Kuiper Belt, NASA’s multifaceted journey of discovery continues.”
The spacecraft currently is in data-gathering mode and not in contact with flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. New Horizons “phones home,” transmitting to Earth a series of status updates that indicate the spacecraft survived the flyby and is in good health after 9 p.m.
The Pluto story began only a generation ago when Clyde Tombaugh was tasked to look for Planet X, theorized to exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. He discovered a faint point of light that we now see as a complex and fascinating world. “Pluto was discovered just 85 yrs ago by a farmer’s son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona,”
New Horizons’ flyby of the dwarf planet and its 5 known moons is providing an up-close introduction to the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, populated by icy objects ranging in size from boulders to dwarf planets. Kuiper Belt objects, such as Pluto, preserve evidence about the early formation of the solar system. As New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched at 30,000 mph, a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft. It will take 16 months for New Horizons to send its cache of data – 10 years’ worth – back to Earth.
For more information on the New Horizons mission, including fact sheets, schedules, video and images, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=49503&linkId=15514645
One of the images taken before New Horizons made it’s closes approach to Pluto on 15 July 2015. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
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