Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft – now en route to Pluto — remains healthy and on course. The probe is roughly 21 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is – well on its way, between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
The craft was launched in January 2006.
“From every indication, we’re so close to a perfect course toward Pluto that we won’t need to conduct a course correction maneuver until at least 2013,” explained Alan Stern, Principal Investigator for the New Horizons mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Last month, New Horizon team members and controllers carried out several systematic checkouts of the spacecraft. “With this checkout behind us, we’ve returned our attention to planning the Pluto encounter,” Stern said
New Horizons is scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system
Also on the books, pre-Pluto inspection is a first encounter rehearsal in the summer of 2012. Next year’s 24-hour rehearsal is a precursor to the full, nine-day-long core encounter rehearsal that the team will run on New Horizons during summer 2013.
What will New Horizons find?
There’s been exciting news about Pluto of late – the discovery and confirmation that Pluto has a fourth moon! The new satellite, provisionally called P4, is fainter and therefore likely much smaller, than either Nix or Hydra or Charon – Pluto’s other three known moons.
Now in the planning stages is a major scientific conference on the Pluto system for the summer of 2013.
That conference will allow the world’s astronomers and planetary scientists to review the state of knowledge about the Pluto system before the New Horizons encounter, Stern said, and to begin detailed planning of ground-based and space-based campaigns to observe the planet and its moons in conjunction with the New Horizons flyby.
The conference will also give researchers a chance to develop educated predictions about what New Horizons may find.
Want to know more about Pluto’s brand new 4th moon and the NASA New Horizons mission?
Check out this radio interview with Alan Stern, at:
http://howonearthradio.org/archives/1092
By Leonard David