Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: 3 Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic Encounter

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: July 14, 2015 at 9:26:16 PM CDT
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Subject: FW: 3 Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic Encounter

July 14, 2015
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NASA's Three-Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic Encounter
Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, taken on July 13, 2015 when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. This is the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto on July 14. The color image has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument that was acquired earlier on July 13. This view is dominated by the large, bright feature informally named the "heart," which measures approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart borders darker equatorial terrains, and the mottled terrain to its east (right) are complex. However, even at this resolution, much of the heart's interior appears remarkably featureless—possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes.
Credits: NASA/APL/SwRI
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto.
After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface -- roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India – making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
"I'm delighted at this latest accomplishment by NASA, another first that demonstrates once again how the United States leads the world in space," said John Holdren, assistant to the President for Science and Technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "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."
Members of the New Horizons science team react to seeing the spacecraft's last and sharpest image of Pluto before closest approach later in the day, Tuesday, July 14, 2015 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls
"The exploration of Pluto and its moons by New Horizons represents the capstone event to 50 years of planetary exploration by NASA and the United States," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Once again we have achieved a historic first. The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match."
Per the plan, 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. Scientists are waiting to find out whether New Horizons "phones home," transmitting to Earth a series of status updates that indicate the spacecraft survived the flyby and is in good health. The "call" is expected shortly after 9 p.m. tonight.
The Pluto story began only a generation ago when young 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 years ago by a farmer's son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system."
New Horizons' flyby of the dwarf planet and its five known moons is providing an up-close introduction to the solar system's Kuiper Belt, an outer region 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.
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, says the mission now is writing the textbook on Pluto.
"The New Horizons team is proud to have accomplished the first exploration of the Pluto system," Stern said. "This mission has inspired people across the world with the excitement of exploration and what humankind can achieve."
New Horizons' almost 10-year, three-billion-mile journey to closest approach at Pluto took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006. The spacecraft threaded the needle through a 36-by-57 mile (60 by 90 kilometers) window in space -- the equivalent of a commercial airliner arriving no more off target than the width of a tennis ball.
Because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched – hurtling through the Pluto system at more than 30,000 mph, a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft. Once it reestablishes contact Tuesday night, it will take 16 months for New Horizons to send its cache of data – 10 years' worth -- back to Earth.
New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple rovers exploring the surface of Mars, the Cassini spacecraft that has revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and the Hubble Space Telescope, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. All of this scientific research and discovery is helping to inform the agency's plan to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030's.
"After nearly 15 years of planning, building, and flying the New Horizons spacecraft across the solar system, we've reached our goal," said project manager Glen Fountain at APL "The bounty of what we've collected is about to unfold."
APL designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the mission, science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtag #PlutoFlyby to join the conversation. Live updates also will be available on the mission Facebook page.
For more information on the New Horizons mission, including fact sheets, schedules, video and images, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
and
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/plutotoolkit.cfm
-end-
Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov
Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
240-228-7536
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu
Maria Stothoff
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-3305
maria.stothoff@swri.org
Last Updated: July 14, 2015
Editor: Karen Northon

How far away is Pluto?
William Harwood
NASA's New Horizons probe, launched in January 2006, has only just gotten to Pluto after a voyage spanning some three billion miles. Leaving Earth at 36,000 mph and covering at least three quarters of a million miles per day throughout its odyssey, it has still taken the spacecraft nine and a half years to reach its target.
It is difficult to make sense of three billion miles in terms of human experience. After all, at Interstate Highway speeds, it would take a car nearly 4,900 years to cover the same distance. Put another way, three billion miles is the equivalent of flying around the Earth 120,000 times.
With the help of the San Francisco Exploratorium's on-line solar system builder, it's easy to get at least a ballpark sense of just how vast the solar system truly is and far New Horizons has traveled.
Imagine the sun the size of a quarter - one inch across - on the goal line of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. Now imagine all of the planets stretched out in a straight line from the sun.
Earth, just 0.009 inches across at this scale, would be positioned around the three-yard line. Mighty Jupiter, just one tenth of an inch across, would be "orbiting" inside the near red zone just past the 15-yard line. Ringed Saturn would be just inside the 30. The outer gas giants, Uranus and Neptune, would be orbiting on the opponent's side of the field, 57 and 90 yards from the sun.
Pluto would be an invisible speck one thousandth-of-an-inch across 18 yards beyond the opponent's goal line. At that scale, the nearest star would be some 458 miles away.
NASA releases sneak peek photo of Pluto
Now let's imagine Pluto is one mile from the sun. In your driveway, draw a circle 15 inches across. That's the sun. Pace off 134 feet and drop a BB. That's Earth. Jupiter would measure a full 1.5 inches across, located some 700 feet away from your driveway and its 15-inch-wide sun.
Pluto, of course, would be a full mile away, measuring just two-hundredths of an inch in diameter. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, would be 6,870 miles away.
Now imagine the sun in Washington, D.C. with a diameter equal to that of the Jefferson Memorial -- 165 feet. At that scale, Earth would measure 18 inches across and be located about 3.4 miles away. Jupiter would would be orbiting some 17 miles away, well within a marathoner's range.
But Pluto would be in the outskirts of Philadelphia, some 132 miles away, and Alpha Centauri would be nearly a million miles more distant.
And finally, there's the toilet paper solar system. Take a 200-sheet roll of bathroom tissue and put a dot on the first sheet to represent the sun. Earth would be five sheets away, Jupiter was be found a little more than 26 sheets out and Pluto would be 200 sheets -- 84 feet -- from the sun.
Armed with a better sense of just how far away New Horizons will be when it streaks past Pluto July 14, keep in mind its priceless pictures and other data will be beamed back to Earth with a pair of 12-watt radio transmitters. And it will take those signals, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, four hours and 25 minutes to cross the gulf to Earth.

© 2015 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Humanity's first ambassador to Pluto makes historic flyby
July 14, 2015 by Stephen Clark
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft returned this photo of Pluto late Monday, the last view of the icy world before Tuesday's flyby. Photo credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
A speedy space probe barreled past Pluto for a one-shot flyby Tuesday, becoming the first spacecraft to ever visit the frozen, reddish world at the solar system's distant frontier 85 years after its discovery by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.
Scientists celebrated the moment NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto around 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT) Tuesday, but the robot explorer was on its own, presumably carrying out a series of observations of Pluto and its moons in a tightly-choreographed sequence crafted years in advance.
"Fifty years ago today, the United States was embarking at the beginning of an era of exploration of the solar system that will live forever in history," said Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. "Fifty years ago today, the first spacecraft flew by Mars. It was called Mariner 4, and I think it's fitting that on the 50th anniversary we complete the initial reconnaissance of the planets with the exploration of Pluto."
New Horizons — traveling nearly 31,000 mph relative to Pluto — only had a few minutes within 10,000 miles the remote world. At that speed, New Horizons traversed the nearly 1,500-mile diameter of Pluto in less than three minutes.
The probe aimed for a box centered about 7,750 miles from Pluto, and officials said a final navigation update showed New Horizons would fly about 43 miles closer to the surface, well within specifications.
Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland will not hear from New Horizons until around 8:53 p.m. EDT Tuesday (0053 GMT Wednesday), when the craft will pause its data collecting and radio a status message back to Earth.
Only then will scientists know the spacecraft survived the encounter.
"We'll find out how it's doing, whether it survived the passage through the Pluto system," Stern said. "Hopefully it did, and we're counting on that, but there's a little bit of drama because this is true exploration. New Horizons is flying into the unknown."
Managers predicted a 1-in-10,000 chance New Horizons could have a fatal collision with a speck of dust or a pebble close in to Pluto.
"I am feeling a little bit nervous, just like you do when you set your child off, but I have absolute confidence thats it's going to do what it needs to do to collect that science, and it's going to turn around and send us that burst of data and tell us that it's OK," said Alice Bowman, New Horizons' mission operations manager.
Powered by a plutonium generator for the long journey into the solar system's dim frontier, New Horizons arrived at Pluto after a nine-year trip from Earth with its telescopic and color cameras and composition-mapping spectrometers ready to scan the dwarf planet and its five moons.
"Stay tuned because our spacecraft is not in communication with the Earth," Stern said. "We programmed it to be spending its time taking important data sets that it could only take today."
Designers made New Horizons with a fixed dish antenna, so the probe is unable to transmit to Earth while spinning around to aim its camera and spectrometer apertures toward targets on Pluto and Charon.
Engineers said the instruments would collect information for storage on New Horizons' two 64-gigabit solid-state data recorders for downlink to Earth in the coming months. It will take up to 16 months for all the data to reach Earth, streaming down at an average rate of 2 kilobits per second.
At that rate, it takes about 42 minutes for a single full-frame black-and-white image to come down from New Horizons.
NASA released a final image of Pluto downlinked late Monday from New Horizons, showing the salmon-colored world in greater detail than ever before. Each pixel from the picture, which the spacecraft captured around 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) Monday, is about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across, according to Stern.
That's 1,000 times better than images taken by the sharp-eyed Hubble Space Telescope in Earth orbit.
"New Horizons took that image yesterday, and downlinked it to the ground," Stern said. "The bits in that image flew at the speed of light for four-and-a-half hours."
New Horizons scientists react to a new image of Pluto, the best ever view of the distant world three billion miles from Earth. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
New Horizons' black-and-white telescopic camera, named LORRI, recorded the view. Image analysts on the ground added color from data supplied by the probe's Ralph instrument.
"The dark regions that you see are near Pluto's equator," Stern said. "The planet is about 1,500 miles across, to give you a scale. It's got a thin or a rarefied nitrogen atmosphere, which you can't see in this image because it's clear, just like looking through other tenuous atmospheres."
Stern said it will take more time to determine exactly what New Horizons sees on Pluto, but textures and hints of the icy world's composition could be gleaned from color contrasts apparent in the picture.
"You can see regions of various kinds of brightness, very dark regions near the equator, very bright regions just to the north of that, a broad intermediate zone over the pole," Stern said. "What we know is that on the surface, we see the history of impacts, we see a history of surface activity in terms of some features that we might be able to identify as tectonic, indicating internal activity in the planet at some point in its past, or maybe even its present."
What seems to be clear is Pluto's surface is more dynamic than Charon's, which appears to be airless with fresh craters and dull gray markings.
"To my eye, these images show a much younger surface on Pluto and a much older, and more battered, surface on Charon," Stern said. "I hope we'll actually be able to (determine) the ages of different surface units on Pluto and Charon."
Pluto's atmosphere is about one hundred thousandth the thickness of Earth's, and Stern said a first glance at the image shows no clear signature of clouds, hazes, or plumes erupting from Pluto's surface.
But it is still early days in Pluto's exploration.
New Horizons' best look at Pluto's climate was to come after the flyby, when the probe will monitor how radio signals passed between the spacecraft and Earth are distorted by molecules in Pluto's atmosphere.
"We also know that this is clearly a world where both geology and atmosphere climatology play a role because Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles," Stern said. "It snows on the surface. The snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248-year orbit. Those have been observed to move around on the surface seen from three billion miles away."
Stern spearheaded a tumultuous effort to get a Pluto probe approved by NASA, which eventually selected the New Horizons mission concept in 2001. The $720 million mission launched on an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral in January 2006 and reached Jupiter 13 months later, becoming the fastest spacecraft ever dispatched from Earth.
For many scientists, the wait to see Pluto took more than 25 years from the drawing board to Tuesday's flyby.
"We haven't all keeled over with strokes and heart attacks yet in anticipation, but some of us have gotten close," said Ralph McNutt, a co-investigator on New Horizons' science team who started working on a Pluto mission in the late 1980s. "These are pictures that have been a long time in the making."
And a portion of Tombaugh's ashes are stowed aboard New Horizons. Pluto's discoverer will eventually be the first person whose remains will exit the solar system.
© 2015 Spaceflight Now Inc.

NASA's New Horizons probe finds Pluto is bigger than predicted
By Irene Klotz
July 13, 2015
Pluto is pictured from a million miles away in this July 11, 2015 handout image
By Irene Klotz
LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - Mysterious Pluto looms large and turns out to be larger than expected as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft wraps up a nearly decade-long journey, with a close flyby on track for Tuesday, scientists said on Monday.
The nuclear-powered probe was in position to pass dead center of a 60-by-90-mile (97-by-145 km) target zone between the orbits of Pluto and its primary moon, Charon, at 7:49 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, said managers at New Horizons mission control center, located at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside of Baltimore.
After a journey of 3 billion miles (4.88 billion km), threading that needle is like golfer in New York hitting a hole-in-one in Los Angeles, project manager Glen Fountain told reporters.
During the 30-minute dash past Pluto and its entourage of five moons, New Horizons will perform a carefully choreographed series of maneuvers to position its cameras and science instruments for hundreds of observations.
Already, scientists have learned that Pluto, once considered the ninth and outermost planet of the solar system, is bigger than thought, with a diameter of about 1,473 miles (2,370 km), some 50 miles (80 km) wider than previous predictions. Pluto is now officially bigger than Eris, one of hundreds of thousands of mini-planets and comet-like objects circling beyond Neptune in a region called the Kuiper Belt. The discovery of this region in 1992 prompted the official reclassification of Pluto from planet to "dwarf planet."
Pluto is pictured in this handout image from New Horizons? Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI)
Size matters, even for dwarf planets. The notch up in girth means that Pluto consists of slightly more ice and a little less rock than predicted, an important detail for scientists piecing together the story of how it and the rest of the solar system formed.
"The Pluto system is a fossil remnant of the beginnings of our solar system," said NASA chief scientist John Grunsfeld. "We're going to learn more about that."
Pluto's diameter also affects the size of its atmosphere, which New Horizons has learned is bleeding off into space at a faster rate than expected.
Most of New Horizons' data will be stored on the spacecraft and transmitted back to Earth after the probe passes beyond the Pluto system. Flight controllers expect to receive just a short message from New Horizons around 9 p.m. on Tuesday that it survived the Pluto encounter.
Lead scientist Alan Stern said there was a one-in-10,000 chance that a debris strike could destroy New Horizons as it nears Pluto.
"We're flying into the unknown," Stern said. "I don't lose sleep over this, but fact is, tomorrow evening is going to be a little bit of drama."
(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
Copyright © 2015 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

This Amazing Photo of Pluto Is Just the Beginning, NASA Says
by Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer | July 14, 2015 11:20am ET

The veil has been pulled back from the surface of Pluto: a jaw dropping new photo of the dwarf planet taken by NASA's New Horizons probe reveals never-before-seen details, and it's only the beginning of more amazing photos to come.
The new image was the last snapshot taken before New Horizons went quiet in anticipation of its close flyby of Pluto, which was scheduled to take place early this morning (July 14). The photo shows two major features on Pluto's surface that have been coming into view over the last few weeks: a large, bright, heart-shaped feature and the head of a darker region that is unofficially being called "the whale" (lower left). The incredibly detailed snapshot also reveals other, previously unseen geologic features on the dwarf planet's surface.
The image was taken on Monday (July 13), when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was only 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from the surface of Pluto. You can see a video of the New Horizons science team discussing their first reactions to the new image here on Space.com. [New Horizons' Epic Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage]
New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto was scheduled to take place at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) today (July 14), but the mission team won't know until this evening whether or not the probe reached its target. Contact with the probe ended, as planned, at 11:17 p.m. EDT Monday night (July 13 —0317 GMT July 14). Mission representatives will hold a press conference tonight at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT July 15) on NASA TV to report on the outcome of the probe's close approach. The spacecraft's "flyby sequence" of Pluto continues through Thursday.
The image was taken with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons, and combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument. Taken on Monday (July 13), the picture is "the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto on July 14," according to a statement from NASA. Pluto's "heart" feature measured approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across, and appears "remarkably featureless," the statement said, "possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes."
This morning (July 14) at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland (mission headquarters for New Horizons), mission team members, guests, members of the press and the general public counted down to the exact moment of the probe's closest approach. The crowds of people erupted in cheers and applause, and waved American flags, when the moment finally arrived.
"I haven't had very much sleep," said Alice Bowman, New Horizons' mission operations manager, at a press conference following the celebration. "But I have absolute confidence that [New Horizons] is going to turn around and send us that burst of data and tell us that it's OK. So I guess it's a mix of feeling nervous and proud at the same time."

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Pluto – Just Look at the Detail!
by Bob King on July 14, 2015
Wow and more wow! In this photo taken yesterday July 14, the large, heart-shaped region is front and center. Several craters are seen and much of the surface looks reworked or altered rather than ancient. Resolution is 4 km per pixel. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
We did it! At 7:49 a.m. EDT today New Horizons made history when it zoomed within 7,800 miles of Pluto, the most remote object ever visited in the Solar System. I thought you'd like to see our best view yet of Pluto in this last and sharpest image taken before closest approach. The level of detail is fantastic.
Universe Today's Ken Kremer is on the scene at mission control, and we'll have much more news and analysis for you throughout the day. For now here's a taste.
Members of NASA's New Horizons team react to seeing the latest image of Pluto. Credit: NASA

Pluto encounter July 14th 11:00-12:00 UTC (6:00am CDT) by Tom Ruen
To give you a better idea of how small New Horizons' targets are, this graphic shows Pluto and Charon as they would appear if placed slightly above Earth's surface and viewed from a great distance. Recent measurements obtained by New Horizons indicate that Pluto has a diameter of 1,473 miles (2370 km, making it the largest known Kuiper Belt object, while Charon has a diameter of 751 miles (1208 km). Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Pluto has a very complex surface. The fact that large areas show few craters – as compared to say, Ceres or Vesta – shows that there have relatively recent changes there. Maybe very recent. Alan Stern, principal investigator for the mission, was asked by a report at this morning's press conference if it snows on Pluto. His answer: "It sure looks like it."
Mission principal investigator has reason to smile this morning during the press conference. So far, New Horizons is doing well. Credit: NASA-TV
Stern is also confident the spacecraft survived closest approach without getting bulleted by dust. We should know tonight when it "phones home" around 9 p.m. EDT.
With the Pluto flyby the latest achievement in over 50 years of humankind's exploration of the Solar System's wild assortment of moons, planets and comets, see the bounty of our efforts in this wonderful compendium titled From Pluto to the Sun by Jon Keegan, Chris Canipe and Alberto Cervantes.