A 9-year voyage bears fruition.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: After a 9-year voyage, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has for the first time ever sent a color image of the dwarf planet Pluto and its biggest moon Charon.
The picture released by NASA has two orange dots, Pluto, and Charon, respectively but, it is hard to differentiate as the image was taken miles away from the dwarf planet. As the spacecraft moves closer to the planet, NASA will receive sharper images of Pluto.
Launched on January 19, 2009 New Horizons will reach Pluto after traveling 3 billion miles on July 14 after a series of trajectory correction maneuvers.
This image released by NASA shows New Horizons’ current position along its full planned trajectory. The green segment of the line shows where New Horizons has traveled since its launch; the red indicates the spacecraft’s future path. Positions of stars with magnitude 12 or brighter are shown from this perspective, which is slightly above the orbital plane of the planets.
Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator said, “This is pure exploration; we’re going to turn points of light into a planet and a system of moons before your eyes.”
“In an unprecedented flyby this July, our knowledge of what the Pluto system is really like will expand exponentially, and I have no doubt there will be exciting discoveries,” said John Grunsfeld, an astronaut and associate administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate.
Pluto was discovered in 1930 and was considered as the smallest planet in the solar system but after reconsidering the location and the size of Pluto, scientists downgraded its status to dwarf planet, which means a planetary-mass object that is neither a planet nor a natural satellite.
Pluto is roughly 1,400 miles wide and is half the width of the United States. The location of Pluto is fourty times far compared to the distance of Earth from the Sun. New Horizons’ mission is to discover more about the dwarf planet and its moons and then go beyond the rocky planets and gas giants of the solar system to understand a totally new zone of the solar system.
According to NASA, the area known as Kuiper Belt contains “mysterious small planets and planetary building blocks,” New Horizons has cameras and other instruments to study the dwarf planet and its moons.
Stern also said that the spacecraft’s encounter was set to be “an exploration bonanza unparalleled in anticipation since the storied missions of Voyager in the 1980s.”
2 Comments
Pluto is actually about 40 times as far from the sun as the earth is (~40 AU)… not four.
Just go ahead and put any picture up there. Seriously, it doesn’t have to be the picture the article is referring to. Just put any bullshit up there.