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The lost 81 minutes. Is New Horizons spacecraft ready for Pluto flyby?

NASA lost contact with New Horizons for about 1-1/2 hours on July 4. Its historic rendezvous with Pluto is July 14, giving engineers time to get the probe up and running.

By Mark Sappenfield, Staff writer July 5, 2015   

Just 10 days before it was scheduled to give humanity its first-ever closeup view of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft went unexpectedly silent.

For 81 minutes on July 4, NASA lost control with its probe. When New Horizons started communicating again, it told mission control that it was in safe mode - in other words, it wasn't doing anything except keeping itself alive while waiting for new instructions from Earth, three billion miles away.

Scientists are trying to figure out what happened, and they must now essentially reboot the craft so it will be fully operational when it hurtles to within 7,800 miles of Pluto on the morning of July 14. It is a daunting task. Each command takes 8.8 hours to carry out - 4.4 hours to transmit to depths of the solar system and another 4.4 hours for New Horizons to transmit its answer back. The process could take days.

But the engineers furiously working to put things right have at least one small comfort: They were made for this.

Between the disappointments of lost spacecraft and the pride of textbook missions is the more-common reality of robotic spaceflight: Something often goes wrong, and NASA needs to pop the hood on a balky piece of machinery from millions of miles away. From Galileo similarly shutting down just hours before it was to make a flyby of Jupiter's volcanic moon, Io, to the Spirit rover temporarily becoming little more than an expensive Martian paperweight, space stuff breaks and - with remarkable ingenuity - NASA fixes it.

NASA engineers are currently trying to figure out what went wrong with New Horizons. But with communication reestablished, they are hopeful that the craft will be in fine working order well before July 14. Some preliminary imaging of Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be lost. But the team is not too worried about that.

"We may lose a few appetizers off the planned menu," mission participant Richard Binzel told Sky & Telescope, "but right now the focus is on delivering the main course."

On Thanksgiving Day 1999, "main course" took on an even more poignant meaning. Galileo went into safe mode just as engineers were cutting their turkeys and dipping into their mashed potato. In order to save the Io flyby, they had to manually retype and resend every command sequence - without a single error - so Galileo knew what to do. The original designers had expected the process of rebooting the spacecraft to take a month; the Thanksgiving Day engineers did it in fewer than six hours.

In 2004, just a few weeks after landing, the Spirit rover on Mars began spitting out only random bursts of data. Without any clue what was going on, engineers began to trace Spirit's unintelligible lines of code like bread crumbs, eventually discovering that Spirit sensed a problem with its flash drive and had unsuccessfully attempted to reboot itself more than 60 times to fix it.  Within weeks, the rover was operational.

Indeed, rare is the mission that does not involve some sort of cosmic jerry-rigging. European Space Agency engineers are still working to establish reliable communications between Philae, which landed on a comet in November, and its mothership orbiting the comet. And even the NASA Curiosity rover, which perfectly executed the most thrilling and complicated landing in the history of robotic spaceflight, had a broken arm for several weeks.

As one Spirit engineer told the Monitor in 2004: "A perfect mission is great, but we engineers love jumping on stuff like this. It's exciting to figure it out and make the craft work again."

CS Monitor

New Horizons probe ready for Pluto flyby despite glitch, says NASA

NASA's New Horizons space probe is still on track for its historic flyby of Pluto next week, even after going into 'safe mode' on Saturday following a minor glitch.

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com July 6, 2015   

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be ready for its epic Pluto flyby next week despite a recent glitch, mission team members say.

New Horizons went into a precautionary "safe mode" on Saturday (July 4) after experiencing an anomaly, but the problem did not turn out to be serious. New Horizons' handlers say the probe should be back to normal science operations by Tuesday (July 7), exactly one week before it performs the first-ever flyby of Pluto.

"The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter 'safe mode' on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft," mission team members wrote in an update Sunday (July 5). "The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter."

If New Horizons does indeed bounce back fully as planned on Tuesday, the glitch's effect on the mission's science return will be miminal, team members said.

"In terms of science, it won't change an A-plus even into an A," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the update.

On July 14, New Horizons will zoom within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto, capturing the first up-close looks at the mysterious dwarf planet. During closest approach, the spacecraft should be able to resolve features as small as the ponds in New York City's Central Park, mission officials have said.

"I'm pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science division, said in the update. "Now, with Pluto in our sights, we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold."

The $700 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006 and is now nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km) from Earth.

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NASA lost contact with New Horizons over the weekend

July 6, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com

Just 10 days before it was due to make its closest approach to the dwarf planet Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft suffered what is being called an anomaly on July 4, forcing it to enter safe mode over the weekend while mission engineers worked to diagnose the problem.

According to Forbes and NBC News reports, the $700 million probe experienced a glitch around 2pm Eastern time on Saturday that caused the US space agency to lose contact with it for slightly less than an hour and a half. Mission control personnel were able to regain contact via the NASA Deep Space Network at 3:15 Eastern.

After losing contact with mission scientists on the ground, New Horizons went into autonomous autopilot and switched control from its primary computer to its backup one, coming back online in safe mode and attempting to reinitiate communication with Earth. It then started transmitting telemetry to help the engineers figure out the cause of the problem.

In a statement, NASA said that their investigation into the incident revealed that New Horizons did not experience any hardware or software problems, and that issue was caused by "a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence" that had "occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby."

Contact reestablished; science operations to resume Tuesday

Officials at the agency said that no similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter, and that New Horizons was on track to resume normal science operations on Tuesday, July 7. The entire July 14 close-flyby sequence will continue as planned, they added.

"I'm pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft," noted Jim Green, the Director of Planetary Science at NASA. "Now - with Pluto in our sights - we're on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold."

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues said that the science observations lost during the recovery from the anomaly would have no impact on the mission's primary objectives, and only a minimal effect on the lesser objectives.

"In terms of science, " Stem said, "it won't change an A-plus even into an A."

Currently, New Horizons is roughly six million miles (9.9 million kilometers) from Pluto and is on course for its scheduled flyby, travelling at a speed of more than 30,000 mph (50,000 km per hour) as it draws closer to the dwarf planet and its moons. The spacecraft's instruments will be mapping Pluto's surface, studying its composition and analyzing its atmosphere.

Reaching Pluto, and the End of an Era of Planetary Exploration (New York Times)

Almost Time for Pluto's Close-Up

In a few days, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will zip past the former ninth planet, the first up-close
look of the icy world in the outer solar system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/science/space/almost-time-for-plutos-close-up.html?rref=science/space&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Space%20%26%20Cosmos&action=swipe&region=FixedRight&pgtype=article

New Horizons: Journeying to Pluto and beyond, Part 1

July 8, 2015
David A. Weintraub for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

Hello Pluto! And Welcome, fellow Earthlings, to the never-before explored Zone Three of our solar system.

The Pluto-Charon system is our window into the final frontier, the last totally unexplored part of our solar system, and we are about to fly through that window and enter Zone Three at 31,000 miles per hour.

The Pluto-Charon system, including the small moons Kerboros, Nix, Styx, and Hydra. (Credit: NASA)

First stop: Zone One

Zone One of our solar system is the zone of the terrestrial, or earthlike planets. Close to the Sun, where we live, we find Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, and Mars, along with Ceres and the other objects in the asteroid belt, like Pallas, Vesta and Juno. All of these are big hunks of rock and iron, and some are planets, while others are moons. Some are asteroids with moons. Some have atmospheres, some don't. They have more in common with each other than with the objects in the rest of the solar system, both because of how they formed and because they are made mostly of rock and metals.

How do they form?

They formed through a collisional process, in which small objects collided with other small objects to make bigger planetesimals. Those planetesimals collided with each other to eventually make ever-larger objects, some of which became planets. The large craters we see most easily on the surfaces of the Moon, Mercury, and Mars testify to this process.

Then internal processes - volcanic activity and plate tectonics, weathering from wind and rain and glacial ice - sculpted and smothered some of the surfaces into what we see today. These objects formed close to the Sun, where the heat of the Sun made collecting the fast-moving gases of hydrogen and helium impossible. Solar heating also ensured that the "ices" of water, ammonia, carbon monoxide, dioxide, and methane were in the form of vapors, not solids, and so they also were difficult for the tiny planets to accrete through collisions.

As a result, the terrestrial zone objects have very little gas and very little "ice" in comparison to outer solar system planets and moons.
zone one

The smaller Zone One along with the much larger Zone Two. (Credit: NASA)

Zone Two: Through gas and ice

Zone Two of our solar system is the zone of the four giant planets and not much else, other than their moon and ring systems. Here, we find the two gas giant planets (made mostly of hydrogen and helium gas), Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter is more massive than 300 Earths; Saturn is as massive as 95 Earths! We also find two ice giant planets (made mostly of methane, ammonia, and water), Uranus and Neptune.

Though Uranus and Neptune are much smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, they are still enormous in comparison to Earth. Uranus has a mass equivalent to about 15 Earths and Neptune to about 17 Earths. The four giant planets have swept this part of the solar system clean of small stuff because their strong gravitational tug of war makes stable orbits in between any of them impossible.

Gas giant formations

These planets formed through a different process than those in Zone One. First, planetary cores bigger than the Earth formed in the way the Earth itself formed, through collisions. Then, those cores used their strong gravitational pulls to grab and hold onto gases from the great cloud of gas and dust that surrounded them, and by doing so, they grow into giant gas-rich and ice-rich planets and created miniature solar systems around themselves.

Jupiter has four moons that are as big or bigger than Earth's moon and has at least 67 moons, plus a ring system. Saturn has one moon that's nearly as big as Mars, four other moons that are half the size of the Moon, and at least 62 known moons, plus a ring system. Uranus has 6 moderate-sized moons, at least 27 total moons, and a complex system of rings. Neptune has one moon that is about the size of Pluto, another dozen moons, and a handful of rings and ring arcs.

In terms of composition, most of the moons and most of the ring material in all these giant-planet systems are dominated by icy material, not rock. As is evident, Zone Two, the realm of the ices and the giant planets, is completely different from Zone One, the realm of rock, iron, and the terrestrial planets.

What about Zone Three? That's where we're headed.

Zone Three is dominated by the Kuiper Belt, which contains as many as 100,000 worlds. Many of these are dwarf planets like Pluto, Eris, Haumea, MakeMake, and Sedna. Others are smaller, like Quaoar, Orcus, Varuna, Huya, and Ixion. We don't know how they formed or what they are made of, or why they even exist.

Why, just beyond Neptune, at a distance of about 30 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun (30 astronomical units, or 30 AU), does the solar system suddenly change in character? Why, just beyond 30 AU, do we find thousands and thousands of small worlds like Pluto, but no Earths or Neptunes? Why, in fact, do we find any objects at all and not just dust and comets?

Why send a mission to Pluto at all?

Here are a handful of great reasons.

Pluto is the only double planet in our solar system. That is, when we think about moons, we think about objects that are so small in comparison to the planet they orbit that the planet barely notices the moon. But Pluto notices. In fact, Pluto and Charon are an incredible, visual example of two objects both orbiting the center-of-mass of the system, which lies in between the two objects. Such objects are different, but we've never had the chance to study such a system. Until now, of course!

The tides have taken control of the system. Charon orbits in 6.3872 days and spins in 6.3872 days. That's just like Earth's Moon, which both orbits and spins in 27.32 days. But Pluto also spins in 6.3872 days. The Earth doesn't spin in lock-step with the Moon! But Pluto does.

Pluto and Charon are locked into a spin-orbit dance in which they both always show the same hemisphere to each other, just as Earth's Moon always shows a "near side" to the Earth. How different or how similar will Pluto's "near" and "far" sides look?

We already know Pluto has extremely bright and extremely dark regions. Except for Saturn's bizarre moon Iapetus, which itself is one weird puppy, no other object in the solar system does "extreme contrast" better than Pluto. Extreme brightness contrasts (think freshly made snow side-by-side with freshly made volcanic rock) require a dynamic and active combination of atmospheric (weather) and internal (rock-making) processes. Can we discover what is happening on Pluto? Does tiny Pluto still have internal activity, and if so, what powers Pluto?

Pluto's moon Charon shows much less contrast. In fact, except for a polar cap, Charon looks almost monochromatic. Why is Charon so different from Pluto?

Hopefully we'll find out soon.

On July 15, 1965, Mariner 4 flew past Mars and returned the first handful of pictures of Mars to Earth. Now, almost exactly 50 years later, on July 14, 2015, another NASA spacecraft will fly past the last of the planets we knew about in the twentieth century that remains unexplored, opening up the last New Horizon in our solar system.

In half a century, we will have both opened an era of planetary exploration and closed it. The next generation of explorers will return to the planets, as they are returning now to Mars and as they are planning now for a return mission to Jupiter and to Europa. But only once do we get to do something for the very first time, and this is that moment.

What have we learned so far about Pluto from the New Horizons mission? And what is about to happen this weekend? Check back tomorrow for part 2!

LIVE PLUTO FLYBY

Science & Technology / Space ·  Less event details
Date

Wed, Jul 15 2015 5:30 AM - Wed, Jul 15 2015 6:30 AM

About

New Horizons is NASA's first mission to visit the dwarf planet Pluto. Because Pluto is so far from Earth, it has taken nearly 10 years for the spacecraft to reach its destination. It launched on Jan. 19, 2006, swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost in February, 2007, and is headed to Pluto, where it will conduct a reconnaissance flyby study of the dwarf planet and its moons this summer. The spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto occurs on July 14th.

Click here to watch: http://livestream.com/GriffithObservatoryTV/plutoflyby

NASA's New Horizons photo shows Pluto's "˜heart'

International Business Times
09 Jul 2015 at 07:57 ET   

It took NASA's New Horizons more than nine years to travel three billion miles to reach Pluto. And now, when the spacecraft is preparing for its highly anticipated July 14 flyby, a new photo of the dwarf planet, obtained by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons, has shown what scientists have never observed before -- Pluto's "heart."

In addition to the prominent elongated dark region, informally known as "the whale," at the equator of Pluto's surface, the new photo also showed a large heart-shaped bright area, which measures nearly 1,200 miles across on the right. The new photo was taken on Tuesday, and is said to be the most detailed photo returned by LORRI so far.

"The next time we see this part of Pluto at closest approach, a portion of this region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than we see today," Jeff Moore, of NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The new image, which is centered on the area that will be seen from a closer distance during New Horizons' July 14 approach, was captured when the spacecraft was just less than 5 million miles from Pluto. The image was also the first to be received after New Horizons unexpectedly shut down on July 4 due to an anomaly.

Earlier this week, astronomers used images of Pluto taken from June 27 through July 3 to create a map, helping mission scientists to decode the complex pattern of bright and dark spots on Pluto's surface.

Scientists expect to better understand Pluto and its neighborhood when New Horizons will pass within 7,800 miles of the planet's surface next week. The spacecraft is currently less than 4 million miles from Pluto.

New Horizons: Journeying to Pluto and beyond, Part 2

July 9, 2015
David A. Weintraub for redOrbit.com

In case you missed it, check out Part I of this series.

What have we learned so far about Pluto from the New Horizons mission? And what is about to happen this weekend? Let's take a closer look.

Closest approach to Pluto will occur on Tuesday July 14 at about 7:50AM EST (11:49:57 universal time; ~6:50AM CST; ~4:50AM PST). You can follow the countdown clock here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/.

The New Horizons mission was launched on January 19, 2006, from Cape Canaveral, Florida and received a gravity assist from Jupiter in February of 2007. Now, zipping along at about nine miles per second, the spacecraft could travel from New York City to Los Angeles in less than six minutes. That's eye-popping fast. But Pluto is ridiculously far away. The Earth is a mere 93 million miles from the Sun. Today, Pluto is 32 times that distance, nearly three billion miles from the Sun. Crossing three billion miles is a long slog, even when cruising at nine miles per second. Even as one of the fastest rockets ever made by humans, the journey of New Horizons across the vast expanse of the solar system has taken nine and a half years, and that time doesn't include the time to plan and design the mission and to build the rocket and spacecraft components. For many New Horizons scientists, this mission has consumed their entire adult lives, their entire professional careers. When you watch them at work, when you listen to them in interviews, you can sense their passion. You're almost singed by the fires in their bellies that burns day and night as they work to make sure everything goes right for this final encounter.

Final hazard analyses, rings, and new moons

Over the last two months, some members of the team have been completing final hazard searches. What's this about? They are using the long range imaging camera, LORRI, which is essentially an 8.2-inch diameter telescope with a digital camera attached to it that is designed to operate at extremely cold temperatures, to look for tiny moons and rings that could damage or destroy the spacecraft as it passes through the Pluto-Charon system.

After the discovery of the moons Nix and Hydra in 2005 (by team members Hal Weaver and Stern), Kerberos in 2011 (discovered by a team led by Mark Showalter) and Styx in 2012 (also discovered by a Showalter-led team), all using images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, mission principal investigator Alan Stern predicted that the hazard team would discover several more moons as New Horizons closed in on Pluto. The navigation team needs to know where all the moons are and what their orbital paths look like in order to avoid collisions. Surprisingly, no more moons have been uncovered.

In addition, a Pluto occultation on June 29, observed from Earth, did not reveal any ring material. During this occultation, Pluto passed directly in between the Earth and a distant star. During this event, a ring around Pluto would have obscured and thus caused a brief drop in the brightness of the about-to-be-occulted star, just before or after the star passed directly behind Pluto. This is how rings around Uranus were detected for the first time, back in 1977. This is also how rings were detected around some smaller Kuiper Belt objects known as centaurs. Hazard analysis, however, hasn't detected any material that looks like rings. As a result of the last few weeks of hazard analysis, the engineers have been able to put the final touches on the flight sequence commands to time the arrival and the direction for passage of New Horizons into and through the Pluto-Charon system.

This series of images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows how the ring system around the planet Uranus appears at ever more oblique (shallower) tilts as viewed from Earth. (Credit: NASA)

The search for rings isn't over, though.

Team members will have one more chance to search for rings when, after passing Pluto, they look back toward the Sun. During our approach to Pluto, we would see the rings in reflected light, as if the ring particles acted like a mirror. When looking back at Pluto, we would see the rings, instead, in "˜forward' scattered light. Some particles, depending on their size, are much better scattering light forward than reflecting light backwards. Good examples of these kinds of particles are those that collect on the windshield of your car. At night, those incredibly tiny particles can very effectively scatter the light from oncoming cars' headlights and create enormous explosions of glare in your windshield.

With enough dust on your windshield, you can be blinded by the glare. Yet, with no oncoming headlights in front of you, you have no problem seeing through your windshield and would never know your windshield was covered with small particles Similarly, if Pluto has a ring composed of tiny particles, the ring may reveal itself better in forward scattered light, after the July 14 encounter.

Pluto is morphing from a distant point of light into a known world. Where once upon a time, that time being last year, all the light from Pluto fell onto a single camera pixel with even the biggest and best telescopes on Earth, by July 1 images of Pluto were 30 pixels across, with each pixel representing a region about 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter. At closest approach, the highest resolution images will see details as small as 80 meters across, which is the size of a football field or a small city park or the width of an airplane runway. We will not be able to map the entire surface of Pluto, because New Horizons is simply flying past Pluto, not going into orbit around Pluto. And remember, because one Pluto "˜day' is more than 6 Earth days, when New Horizons flies past Pluto at nine miles per second, it will see only one side of Pluto and have a chance to map, in detail, only one stripe across that one side. But in that one stripe, New Horizons scientists expect to map out some of the surface terrain that is as bright and reflective as any surfaces anywhere else in the solar system and to map out other surface regions that are as dark as the darkest surface regions known anywhere else in the solar system. Will Pluto show an old, densely pockmarked and cratered surface, battered and bruised and scarred by 4.5 billion years of collisional history, like Earth's Moon? Or will it reveal a young surface, freshly resurfaced and polished, like that of Jupiter's moons Europa? Is the weather on Pluto, which some Pluto experts predict sublimates great volumes of "ices" off some parts of the surface and redeposits them as frost on other parts of the surface, active at this time? We will know soon.

We know Pluto has a polar cap, first seen in images captured on April 29.

We also know that Charon has an anti-polar cap. But of what are these polar caps made? Astronomers, for several centuries, knew that Mars had polar caps. Astronomers of the eighteenth and nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries also knew, for sure, that the polar caps of Mars were made of water ice. Why? Because the Earth's polar caps are composed of water ice and so the martian polar caps surely must also be made entirely of water ice. We were wrong. The polar caps of Mars are composed of a spatially large veneer of frozen carbon dioxide which comes and goes, with a permanent underlayer of water ice. Astronomers have wisely reserved judgment on the Plutonian polar caps, though the early betting is on frozen nitrogen, because telescope observations have suggested that Pluto has a thin, nitrogen-dominated atmosphere. But Earth has a nitrogen-dominated atmosphere and does not have frozen-nitrogen polar caps! On the other hand, Mars has a carbon-dioxide dominated atmosphere and does have carbon-dioxide polar caps. The spectrometer on board New Horizons will reveal the contents of the atmosphere and the contents of the polar cap.

Mars' northern polar cap, as it changes size with a change in Martian seasons. In northern summer, the seasonal veneer of frozen carbon dioxide sublimates, leaving behind the permanent water ice cap.

What else will New Horizons do? Check back tomorrow for Part 3!

New Horizons spots whale and donut on Pluto

July 9, 2015
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com - @BednarChuck

The newest images of Pluto collected by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft have revealed yet more unusual-looking features on the dwarf planet, including an elongated dark band called "the whale" and a bright, donut-shaped patch located near this object's "tail."

According to BBC News, the latest images were captured between June 27 and July 3 using the probe's high-resolution black-and-while Lorri instrument and its lower-resolution, color imaging Ralph camera. The features are located along Pluto's equator.

In a statement, New Horizons scientists said the center of the images corresponds to the side of Pluto that will be visible during the spacecraft's flyby of the dwarf planet on Tuesday, July 14. The area known as the whale is one of the darkest regions visible to the probe, and measures some 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) in length along the left side of the pictures.

"We're at the "˜man in the moon' stage of viewing Pluto," said John Spencer deputy leader of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado. "It's easy to imagine you're seeing familiar shapes in this bizarre collection of light and dark features. However, it's too early to know what these features really are."

Breaking down the features in the latest Pluto images

Located to the right of the whale's "snout" is the brightest region visible on Pluto. This area is approximately 990 miles (1,600 kilometers) across, and could be home to relatively fresh frost deposits, potentially including frozen methane, nitrogen, and/or carbon monoxide.

To the right of the whale are the four mysterious dark spots that have captured the attention of people all over the world, each of which are several hundred miles across. At the left end of the whale is its "tail," which cradles the 200-mile (350 kilometer) long donut-shaped feature.

"At first glance it resembles circular features seen elsewhere in the solar system, from impact craters to volcanoes, but scientists are holding off on making any interpretation of this and other features on Pluto until more detailed images are in hand," the New Horizons team said, adding that higher-resolution images coming up will allow scientists to make more accurate maps of the dwarf planet's surface.

As of Wednesday, New Horizons was less than 4.7 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) from Pluto, according to BBC News. The flyby will take place on the 50th anniversary of the Mariner 4 spacecraft's flyby of Mars, and the new probe will be collecting nearly 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at Mars.

New Horizons: Journeying to Pluto and beyond, Part 3

July 10, 2015
David A. Weintraub for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

In case you missed them, check out Part I and Part II of this series.

The closest approach to Pluto on the morning of July 14 is the most momentous moment for the New Horizons mission, but that certainly is not the beginning of the mission and it by no means will be the end of the mission.

New Horizons has seven scientific instruments that are designed to collect data quickly and store that data on board for later transmission back to Earth. The data will be quickly stored on two solid-state 8 gigabyte recorders, similar to flash memory cards in digital cameras. Then, slowly but steadily, the data will be relayed back to Earth, via NASA's Deep Space Network's largest (70 meter) antennas. The information will race across the solar system at the speed of light, but nevertheless will take 4 hours to travel from Pluto to Earth, and will do so at a tortoise-like rate of 2,000 bits per second. After 16 months, all the science data from the Pluto encounter will have arrived.

Ralph is the "eyes" of New Horizons. Ralph is a camera with eight different detectors. Seven are CCD detectors, like those found in digital cameras (but better). For of thse are color imagers; the other three are black-and-white panchromatic imagers. The eighth detector is like a CCD, but it works in the infrared.   Ralph's best images will be stereo, in order to measure surface topography, and will have a resolution of 820 feet per pixel. Ralph will be used to study the surface of Pluto and the five known moons, to look for clouds and atmospheric haze, and for rings.

REX is a 3.5-ounce circuit board with electronics that are integrated into the New Horizons telecommunications system. As New Horizons passes Pluto, REX will send radio signals past Pluto through Pluto's tenuous atmosphere in order to measure the structure of Pluto's atmosphere, the average molecular weight of the gas in the atmosphere, and the atmospheric temperature. It will do the same for Charon, though for Charon the experiment is mostly designed to simply determine if Charon even has an atmosphere.

LORRI is the "eagle eyes" of New Horizons, the telescope and camera that have been watching Pluto since January. LORRI will map the "far side" hemisphere of Pluto three days before closest approach; at closest approach, LORRI's spatial resolution will be as small as 70 meters across, giving scientists their best view of the geology of Pluto and Charon.

SWAP is an instrument that is designed to detect the stream of charged particles that flow from the Sun (the solar wind) past Pluto. SWAP will measure how those particles interact with Pluto and are (or are not) disturbed by Pluto. Any particles escaping from Pluto's atmosphere that become charged particles will be swept up by the solar wind, and SWAP should detect them as they get carried away from Pluto.

PEPSSI will measure neutral particles that escape from Pluto's atmosphere. Those particles could be molecules of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or methane.

SDC is a dust counter, designed and built by students at the University of Colorado at Boulder. SDS is mounted on the outside of the spacecraft and detects collisions of tiny dust particles with the spacecraft, by measuring the mass and speed of the impactor.

Particles of space dust. Grains of dust in space are tiny, typically about the same diameter as a human hair. Dust grains can be made up of many different elements, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, silicon, and even water ice. (Credit: NASA)

After passing Pluto, New Horizons will continue into the Kuiper Belt.

Larger Kuiper Belt planets shown in relation to Pluto's relation and the New Horizons' path through the solar system. Credit: NASA, from Pluto Flyby Press Kit (July 2015)

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the New Horizons team has identified two Kuiper Belt Objects that happen to be close enough to the current spacecraft trajectory that New Horizons could reach one of them in late 2018 or early 2019, using the remaining rocket fuel on board. This autumn, New Horizons will fire its rockets to aim for the most optimal of these targets. Then, if NASA gives the go-ahead to fund a extended mission for a Kuiper Belt Object fly-by, New Horizons will already be on the way to study an object that is one billion miles beyond Pluto. Both potential targets are about 100 kilometers in diameter; a fly-by of either one would allow scientists to study a type of object that has never been explored before.

After that, onward and outward. The spacecraft will probably have power to remain operational into the 2030s, but continuing to invest funds in tracking New Horizons with the Deep Space Network and keep a scientific and engineering team working to keep the spacecraft functioning might not be a wise use of precious resources. Most likely, the Kuiper Belt object fly-by will be the last major scientific work for New Horizons. But what a glorious ride. The total cost of this mission: about $720 million, over the years from 2001 through 2017, or about $2 per person in the United States to make these discoveries, or about 12 cents per year per person over these 17 years. Not a bad way to invest about a dime a year.

David A. Weintraub is a Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, where he also directs programs in the Communication of Science and Technology and in Scientific Computing. He is an expert in the study of star and planet formation and is the author of three books for popular audiences, including Is Pluto a Planet? (2008), How Old is the Universe? (2012), and Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? (2014), and nearly one hundred peer-reviewed papers in professional journals.

CS Monitor

New Horizons closes dwarf planet: Is Pluto ready for its close-up

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is about to zip past Pluto at 31,000 miles an hour and just 7,750 miles above the surface. The craft will be taking the most detailed images of the dwarf planet, mapping features as small as a football field.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer July 12, 2015      

Laurel, Md. - In less than two days, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to give humanity its most intimate look yet at Pluto and its moons - a historic flyby that closes one chapter in humanity's efforts to explore the solar system even as it opens another.

Pluto is the last of the solar system's nine classical planets targeted for at least a flyby mission. Indeed, Pluto - now classified as a dwarf planet - and its largest moon Charon make up the solar system's only known binary planet.

But Pluto also is the largest body in the Kuiper Belt, a band of icy objects that extends far beyond Neptune. Thus, Pluto also represents the first encounter with an object at the doorstep of this enigmatic region of the solar system.

The $720-million, don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it mission is traveling right down the line after a final course adjustment June 29.

"Everything's going great," said Glen Fountain, the mission's project manager at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., on Sunday. The mission's scientists "are really having a great time seeing the data as it comes down."

New Horizons began its formal sequence of flyby observations on July 7, while it was still 5 million miles from the Pluto-Charon system. Now it's closing to within 1 million miles of the system.

One of the mission's three primary goals is to provide detailed color images of Pluto and its moons.

"We're sick of seeing pixelated blobs," says Hal Weaver, the mission's project scientist. "We're going to turn Pluto into a real world with complexity and diversity."

That's already happening. The latest images of Pluto released to date, beamed back on Friday and Saturday, reveal a region of jumbled terrain roughly 1,000 miles long, what appear to be large craters, and three Missouri-size patches of dark material in Pluto's equatorial region. They appear to be linked to a belt of dark material that spans the rest of the equatorial region.

These dark regions may represent complex hydrocarbons that formed as cosmic rays, the sun's ultraviolet radiation, or the solar wind - charged particles constantly streaming from the sun - interacted with nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices on Pluto's surface, Dr. Weaver suggests.

"It looks like a very rich environment" on Pluto and on Charon, he says.     

The views New Horizons has been delivering so far focus on a different hemisphere than the one the craft will record during Tuesday's closest approach. Beamed back on Saturday, the image revealing the dark patches represents "the last, best look that anyone will have of Pluto's far side for decades to come," noted Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and the mission's lead scientist, in a statement over the weekend.       

Researchers will combine the black-and-white image, taken while the craft was 2.5 million miles from Pluto, with color images and data on surface composition the craft also has gathered. When combined, these data while help mission scientists reconstruct the geologic history of that hemisphere.

The images are serving as a teaser for the main show, which will last for about 24 hours, centered around the closest encounter at 7:49 A.M. EDT Tuesday.

During the last 12 hours inbound, New Horizons is slated to take ultraviolet measurements of Pluto's atmosphere. It also will take data that will yield topographic maps of Pluto and its moons as well as maps of their surface composition.

The mission's heaviest lifting will come during a half-hour period around closest approach, when New Horizons zips past Pluto at 31,000 miles an hour and some 7,750 miles above the surface. The craft will be taking the most detailed images of Pluto and Charon, mapping features as small as a football field. Mapping the surface composition also will continue and in greater detail.

The second major goal is to characterize Pluto's atmosphere and see if Charon has one. Outbound, the craft is programmed to look back at the Pluto-Charon system using experiments designed to analyze the composition and temperature distribution of Pluto's atmosphere. The science team will use powerful radio signals beamed from Earth to measure these properties in Pluto's lower atmosphere. An ultraviolet spectrometer on New Horizons will take advantage of sunlight to "backlight" the upper atmosphere and reveal its chemical constituents.

These approaches also will be used to see if Charon has an atmosphere. The craft will also use the backlighting from the sun to look for any tenuous rings around the system.

New Horizon's flyby sequence is pre-programmed. Radio signals take 4-1/2 hours to reach the craft and the opportunity to make the measurements is fleeting, rendering useless any attempt on the part of ground controllers to adjust the program on the fly - especially at the rapid-fire pace at which the craft will be operating during closest approach.

The team is confident enough in the craft's performance in executing the commands that cheers and high fives are likely to erupt Tuesday morning, even though controllers will have received no indication of what's happening 3 billion miles away, Dr. Stern noted in a briefing Sunday.

New Horizons' communications antenna is fixed to the craft, so the craft must reorient itself to properly aim the antenna at Earth. Any attempt to communicate with Earth during the flyby's most critical period would mean pulling the instruments off their targets.

So back on Earth, mission controllers will be awaiting a brief burst of telemetry slated to arrive during a 16-minute window Tuesday evening. This burst will contain the only spacecraft-status update controllers will receive during the flyby's most critical period.

"It will be intense," says Alice Bowman, the mission's operations manager at APL, of the wait.

For the first time ever, after a journey of more than 3 billion miles and 9 years, a human-made spacecraft will buzz by Pluto within just 7,800 miles of the surface on July 14, 2015.


And we all know astrologers LOVE Pluto! (Or are just too intimidated to say otherwise.) In any case, we at least love to talk about him. So, to celebrate this historic event, Kepler College is hosting its own Pluto Flyby Party, Tuesday, July 14, at 9 am-12 am EDT/6 am-9 am PDT. And yes, if you sign up but cannot attend, you will receive a copy of the recording.


Our audio simulcast will feature all types of astrologers dropping in to send their best wishes to Pluto and share their favorite Pluto stories while we all tune in to the live NASA webcast. The Kepler College simulcast will be hosted by Kepler's own Enid Newberg and Donna Philosophica host Donna Woodwell.


Astrologer guests stopping by our audio simulcast include:

~ Kathryn Andren
~ Joseph Crane, MA
~ Bill Duvendack
~ Margaret Gray B.A. ESS (TCD), MSW, D. Psych. Astrology
~ Eric Francis
~ Ray Grasse
~ Tom Jacobs
~ Sol Jonassen
~ Rose Marcus
~ Russell von Ohlhausen
~ Samuel F. Reynolds
~ Patricia L. Walsh
~ Donna Woodwell, MA


The closest approach to Pluto is set for 7:49 ET/4:49 PT. We won't be able to see a "live" broadcast from Pluto, since there's a 5-hour time lag to send a data signal back to Earth. (Yes, Pluto is that far away!) Nevertheless NASA will be starting its live press coverage of the historic even with news, interviews and images saved from the preceding days to share with the public.


Links to read more on the historic New Horizons Mission to Pluto:

Official NASA New Horizons
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

NASA News Coverage of Pluto Flyby
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasa-announces-television-coverage-media-activities-for-pluto-flyby-300098191.html

What to Expect When You're Expecting a Flyby
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html

JPL Eyes on Pluto
http://eyes.jpl.nasa.gov/launch2.html?document=$SERVERURL/content/documents/newhorizons/newhorizons.xml

Ray Grasse in the Mountain Astrologer
http://mountainastrologer.com/tma/ready-for-your-close-up-pluto

How well do you know the dwarf planet? Space.com Quiz
http://www.space.com/16537-pluto-quiz-dwarf-planet-moons.html

New Horizons Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aky9FFj4ybE&feature=youtu.be

Oh, Pluto Theme Song
https://youtu.be/ALrHiQnkcpc


Register here for the Pluto Flyby Party:  https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/516280450248761602

New Horizons Probe Finds Out Pluto's Bigger (and Icier) Than We Thought


How large? Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). That makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto's downfall as the "ninth planet" back in 2006. Eris' diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles), plus or minus 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).


Read more:  http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/new-horizons-probe-finds-out-plutos-bigger-icier-we-thought-n391321

CS Monitor

Why do we love Pluto?

Pluto's distance from Earth endows it with the allure of the mysterious, and its diminutive size gives it the charm of an underdog.

By Calla Cofield, SPACE.com July 13, 2015   

Pluto - the once (and to some people, forever) ninth planet of the solar system - gets a lot of love from the general public. What makes this icy outlier so loveable?

When Pluto's official status in the solar system was changed from "planet" to "dwarf planet," the public outcry was overwhelming. Neil deGrasse Tyson received angry letters from kids who disagreed with the decision, and the majority of people still think Pluto should retain "planet" status.

But people don't just defend Pluto's status; they proclaim their love for it. This body beyond Neptune seems to invoke more love than do the eight - ahem - official planets. Why do people love Pluto? We asked scientists and members of the general public, and this is what they told us.

A mysterious allure

One of the biggest reasons people love Pluto is that "It's mysterious, simple as that. The one planet we know very little about," wrote Facebook user Ashley Helton.

Facebook user Sebastián Alejandro put that sentiment into poetic terms: "As Herman Melville wrote (and the great Carl Sagan once quoted), 'I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.' Up until now, the outer solar system has been a place forbidden to us because of its remoteness. Pluto embodies a faraway, 'mysterious shore,' and New Horizons is the ship that lets us sail those 'forbidden seas.'"

The New Horizons mission, which will make a close encounter with Pluto tomorrow (July 14), will peel away some of Pluto's mystery. Most notably, the probe will provide the first clear images of Pluto's surface. ("Why do I love Pluto?" wrote Facebook user Anthony Esekhaigbe. "Well, eh, they say love is blind, but now that I'm going to see her, I really want to know why I love her so!")

On Facebook, Mike Appleby wrote, "I was 9 years old when I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I have always been interested in space exploration. Pluto has sat out there for millions of years by itself. This will all change next week as billions of eyes get a close-up look at it."

Pluto was discovered in 1930, and was long thought to be a lone ice ball at the outer edge of the solar system. In recent decades, scientists have realized that Pluto is actually a member of a huge family of objects that make up the true outer solar system: the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.

The allure of Pluto's mystery is shared by scientists.

"I think it's fascinating, because it's the furthest planet, it's the furthest object away from us, it's unexplored," Steve Tegler, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University, told Space.com. Tegler is involved with a project looking to determine the composition of ices on the surface of Pluto. "The first time you visit a planet, that doesn't happen very often. That's pretty exciting stuff, to be able to take first images of its surface and to really get underneath and understand dramatically much more about its physical and chemical properties, structural properties.

"To me, I think the fact that it's so far away, it's really at the limit of our ability as a species to get to it, to send something to it. And for me personally, that's what's so interesting about it, is almost everything we know about the universe comes from the analysis of light, whereas we can send spacecraft to objects in the solar system, but [Pluto] is a real stretch. [New Horizons has spent] the better part of a decade in flight, at some of the fastest speeds ever achieved by a spacecraft. We're sort of at the limit of our ability to reach things, to send something there."

Tegler then added, "P.S. Pluto should be a planet, absolutely. Everybody's got a view."

We can tell you that based on people's Facebook comments, Tegler is not alone in his opinion.
Rooting for the underdog

For many years, Pluto's status as the smallest planet in the solar system seems to have inspired love from many people who sympathized with its diminutive stature.

"It was always my favorite 'cause it was the smallest, like me," Tasha Carrion wrote on Facebook. Jon-Paul Premo seconded that feeling, saying, "I'm small, and Pluto is too. Pluto gets me."

Facebook user ISanderson Sanderson wrote, "As the shortest person among all of my friends, I was always fond of tiny Pluto. It's been my favorite planet since I was a wee child and first learned about the planets. Maybe it's the mystery of what it's like, all the way out there at the edge of the solar system, but whatever it is, I've always loved Pluto. I'm so excited that we'll finally get to see what my little friend looks like and learn more about it."

And then there are those people who have their own reasons for loving Pluto. Facebook user Lisa E. Jankowski wrote, "When I was in junior high and high school, I read a lot of sci-fi. Many of the books used Pluto as a base for research and/or military. I find it fascinating. [I'd] love to see the surface."

On Twitter, Patriot Musket (@Patriot_Musket) expressed love for Pluto "Because it's small and cold. Like an ice cube, which reminds me of bourbon."

Astrophysicist Emily Rice (who will be giving a talk about Pluto at the American Museum of natural History in August, and who you can also catch hosting New York City's Astronomy on Tap under the pseudonym "DJ Carly Sagan") said part of the reason she's excited about the New Horizon's mission to Pluto is because of how excited nonscientists are about it.

"I love Pluto because *everyone* loves Pluto!" Rice told Space.com in an email. "Having the data come in from New Horizons in the next couple days is a rare opportunity in science when the research results will go directly into the public consciousness, which makes it especially exciting. Already, each new image of Pluto (and Charon! and the other moons!) is all over the news and social media, thanks to scientists and journalists like Alex Parker & Emily Lakdawalla. ["¦] Today, you can ask anyone on the street, and they'll have an opinion about Pluto - this is what I love about astronomy today!"

Visit Space.com each day this week for the latest news on the Pluto Flyby and New Horizons.

July 14, 2015

Ashes of Pluto discoverer on board New Horizons for historic flyby

by Chuck Bednar
RedOrbit

When NASA's New Horizons completes its historic flyby of Pluto later today, the man who first discovered the now-dwarf planet in 1930 will be there in more than just spirit, as a small amount of the late astronomer's ashes have made the journey along with the spacecraft.

According to CNN.com, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto 85 years ago when he was just 24 years of age. The Kansas native had been working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, helping astronomers search for a planet located beyond Neptune by reviewing millions of images, New Horizons team members at Johns Hopkins University said.

Tombaugh's search for a "trans-Neptunian" world came to an end in February 1930, when he caught his first glimpse at what would later be named Pluto. Initially believed to be a planetary oddity because of its small size and unusual elliptical orbit, his work eventually led to the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and the realization that small, icy dwarf planets were common in the Milky Way.

Tombaugh, who died on January 17, 1997 at the age of 90, was the first American to ever find a new planet in the solar system. To honor him, a small aluminum canister containing some of his ashes (donated by his family) was placed on board New Horizons. He is the first man to have his remains launched into interstellar space, according to the mission team.

Posthumously visiting the planet he discovered

The canister containing his ashes is approximately two inches wide and one-half inch tall, and was attached to the inside of the piano-sized spacecraft's upper deck, according to CNN. It also bears an inscription written by Dr. Alan Stern, the head of the New Horizons mission.

The inscription reads: "Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's "˜third zone.' Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997)."

On Tuesday, as New Horizons travels to within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) from the surface of the dwarf planet and becomes the first spacecraft to complete a flyby of Pluto, the man who discovered the icy world will be along for the ride - and his family couldn't be happier about it.

"When he looked at Pluto, it was just a speck of light," Tombaugh's daughter Annette said earlier this year, according to CNN. "To actually see the planet that he had discovered and find out more about its atmosphere, find out more of what it is and actually get to see the moons of Pluto, he would have been astounded."

Likewise, back in 2006, his wife Patricia called the gesture "a wonderful tribute."

"Clyde Tombaugh was a grand American, and New Horizons is a grand American adventure," Dr. Stern added at the time. He called Tombaugh's work "a contribution to planetary science that we now know heralded a paradigm shift in our understanding of the geography of our home solar system" and added that it was an "honor... to have launched some of his remains... on the historic mission of exploration that is New Horizons."