New imagery from New Horizons continues to dazzle, with the images below taken by the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument from May 29 to June 2. We’re beginning to pick up bright areas mixed with dark terrain in what are clearly the best images ever obtained of the remote world. As before, mission scientists are using deconvolution to sharpen the raw images and are also teasing out further details with contrast adjustments. The processing can produce artifacts so that fine details will have to be checked at closer range.
Image: These images, taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show four different “faces” of Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. All the images have been rotated to align Pluto’s rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down) on the figure, as depicted schematically in the upper left. From left to right, the images were taken when Pluto’s central longitude was 17, 63, 130, and 243 degrees, respectively. The date of each image, the distance of the New Horizons spacecraft from Pluto, and the number of days until Pluto closest approach are all indicated in the figure. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
We’re still 39 million kilometers from Pluto but the action is getting very interesting indeed. Here’s New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern (SwRI, Boulder) on what we see in the new views:
“Even though the latest images were made from more than 30 million miles away, they show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions—some that may also have variations in brightness. We can also see that every face of Pluto is different and that Pluto’s northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains, though both Pluto’s darkest and its brightest known terrain units are just south of, or on, its equator. Why this is so is an emerging puzzle.”
Describing ‘an increasingly complex and nuanced surface,’ Stern points out that by early July we will have spectroscopic data to help work out just what these differences in terrain are. I also want to add that the discussion of New Horizons’ latest imagery on the Unmanned Spaceflight site has been extremely helpful — just drill down to the New Horizons mission. Unmanned Spaceflight has long been a key resource for those tracking missions throughout the system.
Meanwhile, the pace of news is obviously accelerating. NASA is planning weekly updates on the New Horizons mission for June 16, 23 and 30, but when we get into July, things really heat up, with daily updates live on NASA TV starting on July 7 as we move toward final approach.
With excitement building, be aware of ‘The Year of Pluto,’ a new documentary on Pluto and the New Horizons mission that places the spacecraft in context. New Horizons can be said to be closing out our first scouting phase of the classical planets and beginning the exploration of the Kuiper Belt. NASA TV will have ‘The Year of Pluto’ available beginning Friday June 12th on the following schedule (all times EDT): Friday, June 12 @ 1000, 1300, 2000; Saturday, June 13 @ 0600, 1600, 2100; Sunday, June 14 @ 0800, 1300, 2000. Here’s the trailer for a preview.
As we approach July, it’s also heartening to see the rising degree of public interest in New Horizons. I’ve mentioned Pluto Safari, a free app that uses 3D simulations to follow the mission on both iOS and Android devices (available here for iOS and here for Android). Simulation Curriculum, creators of Starry Night, is behind Pluto Safari, and given its interactive mission information, the app is a real bonus for those following the mission as closely as I do.
From the New Horizons team itself comes Pluto Time, an online tool that tells you, once you’ve entered your location, when your site is experiencing about the same degree of illumination as Pluto itself. Walk outside at the designated time and, given variables of weather and terrain, your surroundings will be roughly as bright as Pluto at noon. NASA is encouraging people to take photos during their local Pluto time and share them with social media using the tag #PlutoTime. Pluto Time surprises me a bit in that my next time will be just past 2030, deep into the evening, to be sure, but a good bit brighter than I had imagined Pluto even at noon.
Image: An artist’s impression of Pluto’s surface. The Sun appears about 1,000 times fainter than it does on Earth. The moon Charon looms large in the sky. Image Credit: NASA / Southwest Research Institute / Alex Parker.
Correct me if I’m wrong! Maybe it’s just the light angle, but now Charon seems to have some contrast, although not nearly as much as Pluto! The latest image of Pluto and Charon TOGETHER shows Charon’s “down” (I assume it is the South pole) pole to be slightly brighter than the rest of the visable surface. I can’t wait for the first SOLO image of Charon.
New ‘Year of Pluto’ Documentary Details Historic New Horizons Mission and Upcoming July Flyby
By Mike Killian
The anticipation is building among the space and science community around the world as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has its sights set on the Pluto system, nearly 3 billion miles from home, taking aim for a historic first reconnaissance flyby of the tiny world that was demoted to a “dwarf planet” by the astronomy community several years ago.
Currently cruising through the outer solar system at about 32,400 mph (as of June 12), the spacecraft is now nearly 32-times further from the sun than Earth is, taking aim for its long-awaited close encounter of this mysterious place that astronomers really do not know much about.
Now just 31 days before the close encounter, NASA has released a new hour-long documentary, titled “Year of Pluto”, which takes on the hard science and provides answers to how the decade-long mission came about and why it matters.
Interviews with Dr. James Green, John Spencer, Fran Bagenal, Mark Showalter and others share how New Horizons will answer many questions, effectively writing the book on Pluto for generations to come and laying the road for future spacecraft to follow, same as has played out with NASA’s Mars exploration missions over the past several decades.
Full article and video here:
http://www.americaspace.com/?p=83100
I too was surprised by the light predicted by Pluto Time, much brighter than I imagined.
Four Weeks to Pluto: From a Point of Light to a Real World (Part 1)
By Ben Evans
In a little more than four weeks’ time, on 14 July, NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft will sweep past the dwarf planet Pluto, its large binary companion Charon, and a system of at least four tiny moons—Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx—as it reaches the climax of a 9.5-year voyage to unveil a group of the Solar System’s farthest known celestial bodies. By so doing, New Horizons will bring full-circle our first-time exploration of each of the traditionally accepted nine planets in the Sun’s realm. Although Pluto was formally demoted in 2006 to the status of a dwarf planet, a trans-Neptunian object, and the largest known body in the Kuiper Belt, fierce debate still rages as to whether it ought to be reinstated as a “planet” or retain its somewhat less lofty descriptor.
Over the coming days and weeks, AmericaSpace’s New Horizons Tracker and a series of articles by Mike Killian, Leonidas Papadopoulos, and myself will cover the discovery and exploration of Pluto to date, the trials and troubles faced by those who desired to send a spacecraft there, and the unfolding developments as New Horizons seeks to make this unknown world known.
As described in last week’s Pluto articles, the discovery of this diminutive world—whose estimated equatorial diameter is only about 1,470 miles (2,370 km), making it substantially smaller than our Moon—came about following unexplained perturbations in the motions of Uranus and Neptune, which prompted speculation that a more distant planet, popularly dubbed “Planet X,” might be exerting a gravitational influence upon it.
Astronomers Percival Lowell and William Pickering predicted its location and suggested its possible size and even physical composition, but their efforts to find it in the early years of the 20th century proved fruitless.
Then, in February 1930, a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., successfully located a star-like object and his discovery of the mythical Planet X caused a sensation. Several weeks later, inspired by the suggestion of a young girl from Oxford, England, the planet was named “Pluto,” in honor of the classical Greek and Roman god of the underworld.
However, it soon became apparent that Pluto was not what it seemed. As early as 1932, the German-born U.S. astronomer Armin Leuschner suggested that its dimness and high orbital eccentricity—its path carried it out of the ecliptic plane, ranging as close as 30 Astronomical Units (AU), about 2.7 billion miles (4.4 billion km), to as far as 49 AU, roughly 4.6 billion miles (7.4 billion km), from the Sun—made it a more likely candidate for an asteroid.
In fact, for certain periods of its orbit, including a 20-year period from January 1979 until February 1999, Pluto was situated farther from the Sun than Neptune. The new world was six times dimmer than Lowell had predicted in his observations and proved so tiny and so dark that it revealed no visible disk to even the largest and most sophisticated Earth-based telescopes.
Full article here:
http://www.americaspace.com/?p=83006
Four Weeks to Pluto: From a Point of Light to a Real World (Part 2)
By Ben Evans
Thirty days from now, on 14 July, a machine fashioned by human hands will speed silently past one of the last great unexplored wildernesses of our Solar System. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, launched 9.5 years ago, is close to the culmination of its mission to reveal Pluto—“planet,” “dwarf planet,” “trans-Neptunian object,” or “Kuiper Belt object,” depending upon your preference—and its system of moons, including its binary companion, Charon, as never before.
By so doing, New Horizons will bring full-circle our first-time exploration of each of the traditionally accepted nine planets in the Sun’s realm. Although Pluto was formally demoted in 2006 to the status of a dwarf planet, a trans-Neptunian object, and the largest known body in the Kuiper Belt, fierce debate still rages as to whether it ought to be reinstated as a “planet” or retain its somewhat less lofty descriptor.
Over the coming days and weeks, AmericaSpace’s New Horizons Tracker and a series of articles by Mike Killian, Leonidas Papadopoulos, and myself will cover the discovery and exploration of Pluto to date, the trials and troubles faced by those who desired to send a spacecraft there, and the unfolding developments as New Horizons seeks to make this unknown world known.
The arrival of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in Earth orbit in April 1990 brought about a renaissance in our understanding of the Pluto-Charon system, despite its early technical troubles.
In October of that year, just six months after launch, HST’s Faint Object Camera (FOC) successfully imaged the pair for the first time, revealing them to be little more than a fuzzy blob, but subsequent observations provided increasingly exciting views and whetted scientific appetites.
More than three years later, in February 1994, following its successful repair the telescope viewed them from a distance of 2.6 billion miles (4.4 billion km) and revealed both as separate, sharp disks. Its data allowed for their respective equatorial diameters to be more carefully refined at 1,440 miles (2,320 km) for Pluto and 790 miles (1,270 km) for Charon, as well as revealing the latter to be somewhat bluer than its host.
“A bright highlight on Pluto suggests it has a smooth reflecting surface layer,” it was noted by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). “A detailed analysis of the Hubble image also suggests there is a bright area parallel to the equator on Pluto. This result is consistent with surface brightness models, based on previous ground-based photometric observations.” However, it was stressed that “subsequent HST observations” would be necessary, in order to confirm that the feature was real.
Full article here:
http://www.americaspace.com/?p=83009