Space & Astronomy

New Horizons prepares for Pluto encounter

By T.K. Randall
April 12, 2015

Image: Artist's Concept of New Horizons
Credit: (PD) NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute It has now been over nine years since New Horizons, the first spacecraft ever to be sent to Pluto, launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V rocket on one of the longest and most ambitious space missions ever undertaken.

When it arrives at its destination on July 14th of this year it will offer mankind the first ever close-up glimpse of this enigmatic dwarf planet and its five moons - Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra - about which very little is actually known.

"We will take hundreds of thousands of photographs and spectral images of Pluto and its moons as New Horizons sweeps past," said mission principle investigator Alan Stern.

"In fact we will gather so much information about Pluto and its moons that it will take New Horizons until the end of 2016 to transmit all its data back to Earth."Right now the probe is so far away from us that it takes 4.5 hours for its signals to reach the Earth and it is traveling so quickly that even the smallest grains of dust could cause catastrophic damage.

"We have got round that problem in a very ingenious manner," said Stern. "We have given the craft a bullet-proof jacket. To be more precise, we have covered it in Kevlar, the material used to make body armour. That should protect it."

After visiting Pluto the probe will then head off to investigate another dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, the vast region of asteroids and icy bodies that makes up the outer solar system.

Exactly what it will find there however remains even more mysterious than what it will find on Pluto.

Source: The Guardian

Tags: Pluto, New Horizons