NASA’s New Horizons probe is just six months from reaching Pluto. There has never been a spaceship that traveled this far before. To protect the instruments, most of deep space probe was in hibernation.
The Mission Operations Center at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory was notified by New Horizons on December 6 that the probe had been awakened and is now operating. The probe will start collecting data when it approaches the Earth on January 15th. 2015. Due to the distance of the probe from earth, the time it takes to get data here is estimated to be around 4.5 hours. It will collect as much data as possible about Pluto’s atmosphere, geology and other aspects.
The probe will capture detailed images of Pluto and its satellites using visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. It will be an important step towards understanding the planet. This is the turning point in a chapter. “This is changing from being a cruise mission to one at destination,” stated Alan Stern, a lead investigator for New Horizons, the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. New Horizons has traveled nine years and will be within 6 miles of its destination in July 2015. New Horizons launched January 2006. The engine is powered by plutonium pellets, which radioactively decompose.
The mission was costing around $700 millions. Pluto wasn’t considered a dwarf planet at the launch, but it was an actual world. New Horizons, on its mission towards Pluto, was able take close-up photographs of Jupiter’s red spot. This was the first ever taken.
The Hubble Space Telescope currently has the best Pluto images. They are of poor quality, and show only red-brown spots that provide scientists little to work with. The scientific community was eager to find out more about Pluto since its discovery in 1930. This represents a significant step in the right direction and may help us to better understand the dwarf planet.