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 NASA / JHU APL | |
| An artist's conception shows New Horizons at Pluto. |
NASA's New Horizons probe passed a key milestone today on its nine-year journey and is now closer to Pluto, its primary target, than it is to Earth. But it still has more than five years and more than 1.5 billion miles to go.
The 1,054-pound (480-kilogram) piano-sized spacecraft blasted off for the solar system's most controversial dwarf planet almost four years ago. New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth, and thanks to a gravitational boost from Jupiter, it's closing in on Pluto at the rate of 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) per day. The probe is due to zoom past Pluto and its three moons on July 14, 2015.
As of today, New Horizons is between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus - a little more than 1.527 billion miles (2.463 billion kilometers) from Earth and 1.526 billion miles (nearly 2.462 billion kilometers) from Pluto, according to today's status report from mission control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. (APL is managing the mission on NASA's behalf.)
So this is the halfway point, right? Well, that all depends on what your definition of "halfway" is. "This is the first of several milestones over the next 10 months that mark the halfway points in our journey to the solar system's frontier, where Pluto lies," said Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.
In an e-mail, Stern explained why there's more than one halfway point:
"We are not yet halfway. That comes in late February. We are closer to Pluto than Earth as of today. It's not the same! Why? Because Earth is on the far side of the sun from Pluto. Make sense? ... We get halfway in miles before halfway in days because we are slowing down, owing to the sun's gravity, and therefore the second half of the miles takes a little over half the time. Halfway [in mileage] is February 25; half the days is October 17, both 2010."
Another complication is that Pluto is getting farther and farther away from the sun each day, and that means the halfway point between the sun and the place where Pluto will be for the 2015 encounter is a different day altogether: April 20, to be precise.
 JHU APL | |
| This graphic shows the position of the New Horizons probe with relation to Pluto, Earth and other planets. |
As far as New Horizons' camera is concerned, Pluto is still just a speck in a black sky. In fact, the spacecraft snoozed through today's milestone and won't wake up until next month, for a quick 10-day tuneup. But when 2015 comes around, New Horizons will send back our first-ever close-up of a world that has a thin atmosphere and icy clouds, a mottled surface, and possibly ice volcanoes as well.
The view just might be cool enough to put Pluto in an unprecedented spotlight, almost a decade after its demotion from the nine-planet pantheon. Will its current dwarf-planet designation be reconsidered? Will that designation really matter? "Today's pedantic fuss over planetary semantics will seem naive and irrelevant," the Space Telescope Science Institute's Ray Villard predicted today in a Discovery News blog posting.
It might have been different a decade ago, when it wasn't clear whether the $700 million mission would ever get off the ground. As it was, Stern and his colleagues had to struggle for 17 years to get New Horizons launched. At the time, Pluto was sometimes called the "last unexplored planet," even though the discovery of other icy objects on the solar system's ring was already making it clear that Pluto wasn't the last planet after all.
Suppose the International Astronomical Union had reclassified Pluto while New Horizons was in doubt. Would there have been any space mission to the solar system's icy edge? "I am convinced ... if the IAU had acted prior to 2003, we would probably not be en route today," Stern told me earlier this year.
As it is, New Horizons will continue its journey through the Kuiper Belt long after the 2015 encounter with Pluto, sending back data about other ice worlds as well. For how long? Who knows? Villard points out that the solar system's frontier stretches for a mind-boggling distance - so far that it would take New Horizons 80,000 years to get to the nearest star.
To learn more about New Horizons, Pluto and the planetary frontier, check out my book, "The Case for Pluto" - and stay tuned for more Plutonian milestones in the months ahead.
Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter.
It's a wonderful venture but doesn't upstage the pioneer and voyager missions of the '70's. Also, it just goes to show you how far we have to go before spacecraft are faster and better at traversing solar system distances.
Horizons will be communicating with 10 year old technology in 2015 but still far more sophisticated than the voyagers. I believe the voyagers communicate at the speed of a slow fax machine.
The fact that the Voyagers still communicate at all is fascinating to me. Considering how unfathomably far away they are, I'm interested to see what data they will send (if any) once they break free of the Solar System.
The milestone I'm waiting for is either the overturning of the IAU definition or the adoption of an alternate planet definition by a different group of planetary scientists. Once New Horizons reveals Pluto to be a complex world, it will be clear it represents the first in a new class of planets.
Will it get any views or gather any data about Neptune as it passes? Or will Neptune be in a different part of its orbit when New Horizons passes through it?
IT'S INTERSTING TO HEAR SPACE SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMOROW FOR YOUNG RESEARCHERS IN THIS FIELD .PLUTO IS MORE FARTHER TO SUN TOMOROW THAN TODAY . WILL IT BE IF SO OTHER PLANETS SHOULD DO THE SAME AS THERE IS ATRUCTION BETWEEN THE MASSES AND WHAT WILL BE THE END OF THESE ATRUCTIONS ! the end of the pulling....
Mr. Ashby, I think your missing the point. This is an amazing milestone in Astronomy and in Engineering for us as a human race. Trying to compare Voyager and Pioneer to New Horizons is like trying to compare apples to oranges. Not to mention you contradicted yourself.
80,000 years to reach the nearest star. Life is so short and we waste it on petty squabbles over territorial rights.
Interesting article Alan! The New Horizons craft is making sure and steady progress towards Pluto. The only drag about these deep space missions to the outer limits of our solar system is the long wait time from blastoff to actually seeing the results of the data coming back when it gets there. Can't wait to see the pictures in 2015.
With all the year and decade end lists I think one thing was forgotten. For the decade list building the International Space Station should be right up near the top. Now that there have been so many flights up there it's become somewhat blase and routine, like the Apollo moon landing missions did. Building the ISS has been remarkable to watch and it's saddening that the shuttle construction flights are coming to an end next year. With no more shuttles what is going to help build the next generation of ISS?
We spent money on this meanwhile how many will go without health insurance during this time period we could have paid for with funds for project like this?
I find it interesting the change in planetary thinking over the past 50 years. I remember when Pluto was considered the oddball planet of the solar system. Now Pluto is representative of an estimated 70,000 Kuiper Belt Objects. It is thus now the "typical" planetary body and the eight major planets are "atypical".
Half-way points are relative, aren't they? Depending on the frame of reference. Sounds like the beginning of a really good theory.
Navigating (astrogating?) between two moving planets (In your eye, IAU!) is a more complicated task than most people expect. More difficult than science fiction would have had us believe, certainly. Throw in intervening planetoi and one hell of a time lag and things get rather tough.
Well done to the NH team!
Alan, When are you next coming to the East coast? I'd like to get you JH on my copy of TCFP.
Looking at the graphic for this article (the orbits of the planets of the sun) lead me to an interesting thought. Pluto and Neptune swap places of furthest from the sun, meaning they must at some point cross planes. Since they're orbiting at different speeds, can someone calculate the day these two might ever collide? I think Pluto's orbit actually is tilted from the plane the planets normally orbit, but it does cross over some point that Neptune used to be... you'd think, eventually (we have LOTS of time to wait), that these two would be in the same place at the same time. I'd love to see that collision!
Way Kewl. I'll be looking forward to the new data on Pluto and anything else out there that it can spot.
ps. Alan, do you know if they'll be able to image Charon, Nyx or Hydra during the flyby?
So, three hundred years from now when Voyager comes back to us attached to a huge alien artifact, which one will be more advanced then, huh?
Curious, why is New Horizons going to just pass Pluto by and not settle in orbit?
[ALAN ADDS: That would have been great, but it would have raised mission complexity and cost by quite a bit, and in the book I lay out in more detail how cost-constrained this mission was. The mass and cost limits had to be repeatedly reworked to turn this mission into a reality. It will gather data about Charon as well as Pluto, but I don't know how much it will get about Pluto's two smaller moons.]
New Horizons could have been sold as the first mission into a region of the solar system unlike (and more 'fundamental' than) any other instead of one that's just 'ticking off' another odd planet - we would have been spared the most superfluous 'debate' astronomy has had to endure in ages ...
Please correct the name. It should be Johns Hopkins (with a "s"), not John Hopkins.
[ALAN ADDS: Ugh, fixed. That must have happened during editing process.]
It will take the signal, generated by this probe, nearly 4.5 hours to reach earth. The relationship of that to the distance of the nearest star should alert even the most simple minded about the gargantuan distances space exploration must find a way to master.
Pluto deserves to be recognized as a planet. Why else would we send a probe to it? Has it been reclassified anywhere other than the United States? Poor Pluto, it got the short end of the stick.
It would be great if we could have probes detect minerals in the asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter as well as out in the Kuiper belt. From there, we could mine the resources to build something to explore the stars etc.
from Almanzo Wilder, SD "We spent money on this meanwhile how many will go without health insurance during this time period we could have paid for with funds for project like this?"
...Why bother even going here when we spend even BILLIONS AND BILLIONS(sorry Carl!) more in the theatre of war...We could ALWAYS find something more worthwhile(from a humanitarian aspect) to spend money on...
80,000 years to reach the nearest star. Makes you wonder if the "search for life" out there is all worth it. Even if spaceflight could travel nearly the speed of light (doubtful) it would still take several years. Got to go. A flying saucer just landing in my backyard....
We spent money on this meanwhile how many will go without health insurance during this time period we could have paid for with funds for project like this?
Almanzo Wilder, SD
Please, Enough already you whining liberal! America has to be in the forefront of Space exploration, building a base on the Moon, to use that as a stepping stone to the Stars. Now, that Scientists have found water on the Moon, we can and should definitely start getting ready for America's return to the Moon, and the beginning the building of a base on the Moon. then, after that, a possible manned flight to the Red Planet. But, with the whiny liberals like Almanzo that want to give everything away to parasites that don't deserve our help in the first place, instead of thinking of the big picture here, like the future survial of the human race and the conquest of space for the good of Mankind.
It may have been the fastest spacecraft when launched, but not anymore, just check Heavens-above.com. One of the Voyagers claims that title. My only regret is that it will make its closest approach on France's biggest day, Bastille Day in 2015.
Almanzo Wilder,
We *are* trying to spend money on health care. And what happens? Half the country is having a cow over it. Whenever anyone crabs and moans about how we should stop wasting money on (fill in the blank) because we should be "helping people", the truth is, when we do spend the money on helping people, people crab and moan about that too. Another truth is, there is money for helping people *and* space. But we humans still spend too much money on truly stupid things that no one needs.