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The Year of Pluto - New Horizons Documentary Brings Humanity Closer to the Edge of the Solar System

Feb 27, 2020
There is a mysterious area far away in our

solar

system

, it is a region of ice worlds, some lonely, others with moons, their names may be unknown, Eris, but they contain clues to all our origins and the first of these worlds and the one we will reach in 2015 is the king. from the kuiper belt

pluto

the long journey of nasa's new

horizons

mission began in 2006 aboard the biggest and baddest rocket in the united states equipped with every thruster imaginable we built a very light spacecraft and bought a very large launch vehicle and the combination is fierce but in In a sense, it all began in 1930 with 24-

year

-old Clyde Tombaugh, fresh from a farm in Kansas, but willing to spend long hours scanning star fields to find a moving point of light.
the year of pluto   new horizons documentary brings humanity closer to the edge of the solar system
Humanity's first glimpse of Pluto. The dream of reaching Pluto began with a six-

year

-old boy in love with science who grew up to lead a team of brilliant researchers and engineers with dogged persistence through decades of planning, building and testing, a race against time just to reach the launch pad exploring the outer

solar

system

. Because it takes a long time so far, it requires a lot of patience, a lot of dedication, a lot of perseverance, but it is the frontier, assuming everything goes well on Pluto, NASA may choose to extend the adventure further, towards the Kuiper belt, the mysterious solar system. third zone this is perhaps the only chance in my lifetime for us to take a spacecraft out and take a close look at one of these Kuiper Belt objects December 6, 2014 new

horizons

awaken for the last time from hibernation new horizons are accelerating towards Pluto at a phenomenal pace and we can't wait for it to get there January 27, 2015 six months of approach science begins July 14, 2015 new horizons long journey three billion miles nine years of flight and 85 years of speculation about the climaxes of Pluto in one day of approach and flyby you know we are on third base and heading home the dream the adventure the promise of discovery that is what makes 2015 the year of Pluto studying Pluto and its neighbors from Earth is One of the most difficult challenges in astronomy requires the largest telescopes and most advanced instrumentation on the planet and is difficult even for the Hubble space telescope: it takes time from the discovery of Pluto in 1930 until NASA approves the New Horizons mission in 2001 and arrives on the planet in 2015.
the year of pluto   new horizons documentary brings humanity closer to the edge of the solar system

More Interesting Facts About,

the year of pluto new horizons documentary brings humanity closer to the edge of the solar system...

It's been 85 years and the passage of time is definitely a player in our story, but it is the combination of cutting-

edge

human image processing skills and sheer persistence that has resulted in the most important discoveries and that's a story as true today as it was in 1930 when Pluto was first found by Clyde Tombaugh in 2011 at the Seti Institute near San Francisco. Mark Showalter used Hubble data to discover two new moons around Pluto, although he was actually looking for possible rings. Showalter has found rings associated with small moons around other planets and that was that kind of motivation to look at Pluto.
the year of pluto   new horizons documentary brings humanity closer to the edge of the solar system
It has two small satellites. The satellites kick up clouds of dust. Let's see what could be there. It's easy to take artistic license to show what the rings would look like. rings of Pluto in reality it is incredibly difficult to see faint objects against the dense background star field and the glow of Pluto and its large lunar star, we came up with this trick where you take the images and then rotate the camera 90 degrees, you take more pictures and if you do it right, you can do this thing where all that glare cancels out and what we're left with is just the rings.
the year of pluto   new horizons documentary brings humanity closer to the edge of the solar system
We can think of it as a stack of images. Think of it as a cube looking down, so let's turn it over, so now we start peeling. Outside of the layers and looking down through the stack, things suddenly become much cleaner, for example Hydra and Nyx appear very, very clean, but what immediately caught my attention was this little dot there, It's not a perfectly sharp hot pixel like here and that's what made it pretty convincing to me that we had seen a very small moon of Pluto that no one had seen before. To be sure you have detected a real moon or planet, you have to show that it is moving unlike the stars in the background, which moons do.
The distinctive thing is that if we came back later, they would all have moved because they all orbit the central planet. This required a lot of patience to then wait about six days until we got our next set of observations of the Pluto system, sure enough the object was. Still there, it had moved about just the right amount to be something orbiting Pluto and we knew we had a moon next year. Showalter and his colleagues went back and used the lessons learned to see what else might be there in the summer of 2012. Now Mark had 15 more. days of Hubble observations now what you can see here are three time steps, each of those time steps is actually about 45 minutes of data, which means it's long enough for the little moons to move , they move back and forth in the three frame sequence, the hydra moves n and x is moving, I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to say it looks like a small moon of Pluto, it's moving just like it What the others do, they are all circling the planet in the same direction, so there were only a couple. weeks later we announced that the fifth moon had been discovered patience perseverance ingenuity that was exactly what led to the discovery of

pluto

back in 1930 in Kansas in the 1920s clyde tombaugh grew up in difficult times and built telescopes using leftover farm implements to check The precision of his best telescope sent drawings of Mars and Jupiter to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, they were looking for personnel and hired him in addition to observing the stars, he stoked the oven and shoveled snow, but one task made history day after day.
The day he used this machine known as a flicker comparator to look for anything in his images that moved, it was a tedious and painstaking job, but on the plates taken on January 23 and 29 and analyzed in February he saw a small dot that did It moved against the stationary. stars announcing the results after careful confirmation, the observatory facilitated the search for the new planet by directing arrows. This is an incredible piece of observational astronomy and having done something similar but with much more powerful tools, I can really appreciate the achievement of it over the decades. Pluto stayed longer. or less a point of light, but in the mid-1970s, Dale Crookshank and his colleagues attached cameras with infrared filters to a telescope on Kitt Peak.
Detectors or sensors had been improved and larger telescopes were available. We did that work in 1976 and found evidence of freezing. methane on the surface of Pluto several years later we found evidence of the other Isis in 1978 astronomers Jim Christie and Bob Harrington analyzed new plates taken at the US Naval Observatory in Flagstaff Christie noticed an elongation north of Pluto a month later the Of the eclipses between Pluto and Charon that occurred in the 1980s, astronomers calculated that the moon was almost half the size of its parent body, so large that both objects rotated around their orbits. mutual center of gravity outside Pluto Pluto and Charon were the first combo of double dwarf planets discovered in our solar system using the basic physics of their orbits and the distance between them astronomers were able to calculate their mass and size Pluto was slightly smaller than Earth's moon was about 1,500 miles in diameter and was only a tenth of its mass.
Between 1985 and 1990, astronomers were lucky as Pluto and Karen orbited each other's center of gravity, each passing in turn in front of the other. so-called mutual events allowed astronomers like Mark Bowie to capture changing light patterns buoy patiently created a map of pluto pluto turned out to have one of the two most contrasting surfaces in the entire solar system in the mid-1990s and alan stern used the space telescope Hubble to take the first direct images of the surface of Pluto and it's exciting for Mark, myself and our entire science team to be able to see this object that no human being could ever really glimpse as a real planet as a real object in the solar system before.
In 2005, Hal Weaver and Alan Stern used Hubble to In another close look at Pluto and Cairo, they discovered two small dark moons where only Charon had previously been seen. We now know from the work of Mark Showalter that there are two more moons, making the current total five, and that Pluto is a bona fide planetary system. From its size and orbit, astronomers estimated that Pluto is perhaps 70 parts rock and 30 parts ice, making it one of the largest of a new class of objects. The ice dwarf planets form what is known as the Kuiper Belt. This region is named after Gerrard Kuiper.
The prominent planetary astronomer of the mid-20th century, Kuiper, suggested that the solar system did not end with Neptune and Pluto, but that there should be a disk of other worlds beyond them. In 1992, from a mountaintop in Hawaii, David Jewett and Jane Liu found the first Kuiper Belt object. They were using new, highly sensitive CCDs like the sensors in a modern digital camera, but their technique was essentially an updated version of Tombaugh's work: taking carefully recorded images of a patch of the sky and seeing if anything moves against the distant stars. This qb1 just did it. which was only a few hundred kilometers in diameter, ten times smaller than Pluto, but still huge compared to a comet, teams of astronomers have since found around 2000 kbos based on cutting-

edge

astronomy but with a healthy dose of license artistic, let's take a trip through In this third zone of our solar system we used to think that the solar system consisted of two different types of planets, the planets that we call terrestrial planets, which are Earth-like planets that would be Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars, following the fragments of the asteroid belt. of worlds are torn apart by gravitation and collisions, then come the four gas giants, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn with its magnificent rings, also ringed Uranus and Neptune, and then Pluto was this kind of strange guy, it was this little object at the edge of the solar system and then when we find all these other Kuiper Belt objects, this is almost a third type of object, so for the first time we will be able to fly next to a new object, an object that is has been forming for billions of years. years and understand what the outer parts of the solar system are all about, by July 2015 we will know for sure what Pluto and its moons are like, and that will provide groundbreaking information about all those other ice dwarf planets, the most numerous planetary objects in the entire world. world. solar system that forms the kuiper belt actually the kuiper belt is more like a donut that sticks out above and below the ecliptic where most of the planets move it is like the asteroid belt but much larger and has hundreds of times more objects in it than the asteroid belt let's now visit five named kbos in the exact positions they will be on july 14, 2015 the day new horizons flies by pluto was one of the first objects in the kuiper belt Discovered, it is about 1,000 kilometers in diameter, a reddish world covered in water, ice, methane and ethane and, like many KBOs, it has a small moon of its own.
Up and down the plane of the solar system, numerous kbos have been thrown around by Neptune's gravity. This region is known as the scattered disk. One of the largest of these KBOs, Eris is about the same size as Pluto and is made of rock and methane ice. Astronomers classify kbos by the inclination of their orbits relative to the plane of the solar system and one of the most inclined orbits belongs to makemake named for a Hawaiian creation deity, some of these have methane or water ice on their surfaces , some of them just seem to be covered in brown gunk, there are gray objects out there, there are brown objects out there, they seem to be different populations, some of them seem to be very spherical and that's why they probably have worn out interiors and then others have peculiar shapes which suggest that they are very cold and strong perhaps the strangest and most unexpected kbo is haumeo a football shaped kbo made of rock and ice it is white with red spots and is orbited by at least two moons one of the strangest orbits in any kbo belongs to sedna discovered in 2003 its orbit is the most eccentric of any kbo now known, bringing it up to 76 au

closer

to the sun but then taking it outward 936 times the distance between the earth and the sun.
Sedna's strange 11,000-year orbit seemslinking it to an even vaster cloud of objects ready to be explored by future generations. The Oort cloud is an immense ice box of long-period comets 10 to 100 times more distant than the Kuiper Belt surrounding all known worlds in our solar system. There is an actual record of the early history of the solar system stored in cold at the edge of the solar system this is what was left pluto is the first member of that group but to begin

humanity

's exploration of the kuiper belt, we must first get to pluto and that means getting a mission approved , a spacecraft designed, built and delivered to the launch pad on time and none of it was easy. 2015 may be the year of pluto, but getting there has taken many years of effort and to reach new horizons there is a date when things began 1989 was the year George Herbert Walker Bush became president and the Berlin Wall fell far from earth it was also the year in which nasa's voyager spacecraft flew past neptune and returned the first images of its moon triton the hairstyles of some scientists of the new horizon were very different but for them may 5, 1989 was A very important date, that is the day I walked into the then director of the planetary science division at NASA headquarters, Jeff Briggs as a graduate student and asked him why we are not studying a mission to Pluto and he responded because no one had asked me before.
It seems like a brilliant idea, why don't we make space missions dependent on hundreds, if not thousands, of people, but sometimes it takes someone with passion and perseverance to make things happen and for new horizons that's Alan Stern. I was interested in this as a kid, so I've been somewhere between pacing and stuck in a routine for 40 years. Some thought about sending one of the twin Voyager spacecraft beyond Pluto to complete exploration of the known solar system, but in the 1970s the scientific establishment was not convinced that Pluto was that interesting. Young graduate students like Alan Mark Bowie and Fran Bagano thought differently back then.
At the end of 1989 or so there was a group of us who were very interested in going to Pluto and what attracted me the most was the fact that we knew so little that here is the border, so it was kind of an opportunity . so that the young people would come and say: where are we going to go now? what is the next great frontier that we should explore and it was clear all the way to the kuiper belt alan fran mark and a small group of enthusiasts became known as the subsurface of pluto so we realized that for this to happen we had to get together and do a strong campaign to make the case for going there and exploring this little planet with all its moons.
During the 1990s, there were many competing plans for a Pluto mission like the Pluto fast flyby. pluto kuiper express a pluto mission was on, then off, then on and off the pluto mission would have been a cat, would have been dead a long time ago because they only have nine lives and we have had significantly more than nine interruptions and strange twists and turns . Finally turning the tide was the National Academy's decadal survey, a consensus document of leading planetary scientists who ranked a Pluto mission in the Kuiper Belt as the highest priority for middle-class budgets, finally, after it was They evaluated competitive proposals, new horizons that united Alan Stern with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
APL and several other institutions across the country was selected by NASA on November 29, 2001. Now plans on paper became metal in clean rooms. In 2004, chief scientist Alan Stern described the key scientific objective of the mission, well, you know, the key to planetary science is, uh, that you really have to go places to get the resolution to get close enough to really see what's going on. We want to reach out and do it personally. The better resolution of current telescopes looking at Pluto would make this type of blurry image much more familiar looking. world, but this is what new horizons would see if you flew over the lakes of new york city in midget central park on the hudson river new horizons is really the first of a completely new generation of spacecraft that focuses on a very specific task for this first mission to pluto the questions are basic what pluto and karen are like what they are made of how their atmospheres behave we have to be really disciplined and say that we cannot do everything let's focus on the main questions and design the instruments to answer those main questions the laurie long-range imager will be used for navigation approaching pluto and close-up views during the flyby the ralph wide-angle camera has visible light and infrared sensors to map pluto and karen and characterize their icy surfaces There are two fields and particle detectors to probe the solar wind on Pluto, the large radio antenna is an essential communications device, but both Rex and Alice and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer are part of experiments to analyze Pluto's atmosphere and are The Venetia Bernie Student Dust Counter built by undergraduates at UC Boulder and in honor of the school girl who named Pluto in 1930.
Together, the seven scientific instruments comprise the most powerful array of detectors ever sent on a first flyby of any world of our solar system, but their innovative, highly miniaturized design means that even when they are all operating, they draw less energy than half a 60-watt light bulb and are intended to work together seamlessly after construction and testing, but always with one eye on the clock and the calendar, it is very, very important that we launch it in 2006 or 2007. We have to achieve it. Deadline If you want to fly to Pluto the fastest route you need Jupiter in position and that means we have to launch in January 2006.
It feels a little like being strapped to a train going 500 miles an hour. The testing program involves equipment. of engineers at Johns Hopkins APL and then NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, once we launch this, we can't chase it with a screwdriver, we can't go fix anything that doesn't work, we make sure we bring enough spare equipment . On board the spacecraft, our main computer breaks, we have a backup, if our main transmitter breaks, we have a backup, one of the things we do is we put the entire spacecraft on a gigantic shaking table, a paint shaker, shake it and then test it after that. and shake it again and test it again, so that's what we're going to do from now on to launch it along with testing the spacecraft.
New Horizons needs to train and test its human operators and for a mission plan to reach Pluto in 2015 it is important to have young people. on board early so they can get up close. It's good that we can do that so they have the time and focus to stay on mission for this long period of time. Many of the faces you see at Mission Control in 2004 and 2005 are young, enthusiastic spacecraft engineers, normally we focus on the spacecraft subsystems and instruments that survive that period, but you know, people We have to have a longevity plan, they will commit the best of their careers to this mission to Pluto knowing that it would be a decade older when New Horizons reaches its primary goal.
The ability to practice things in those distant years. Now it's all part of the planning to ensure the success of the mission. Then in 2015, yes, late 2005, the action moves to Cape Canaveral. New Horizons. It may be light and relatively small, but launching it to Pluto requires America's most powerful rocket. The Atlas V New Horizons will travel so far from the Sun that solar panels would not be enough, so the Department of Energy delivered an RTG that would power Pluto. mission converting the heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity working 24 hours a day. They arrive at Platform 41 before dawn on behalf of NASA and the entire New Horizons team.
Stern wanted to be the last to wish the spaceship a safe voyage before closing the hatch. on January 19, 2006, after 17 years of planning, building and testing a perfect launch that thrilled spectators in Florida and the mission operations team at Johns Hopkins in Maryland, Pluto and then beyond, despite immense technical and schedule challenges, the mission had come to an end and new horizons were on the way the speed at launch was the fastest ever traveled almost 60 times faster than a passenger plane in just nine hours it passed the orbit of the Apollo moon had taken almost 10 times that time a year later a gravity-assisted slingshot from the giant planet Jupiter provided another two-kilometer-per-second boost cutting Pluto's travel time by three full years, but this was more than just a jump in speed.
The Jupiter flyby was a scientific test for Pluto. New Horizons' instruments returned detailed images of Jupiter's clouds, moons and wings. It then crossed the empty ocean of space with no new land in sight to Pluto in 2015. The spacecraft had been tested and approved with great success now it was time to test humans and Earth systems July 5, 2013, es On the first day of a nine-day rendezvous rehearsal the main success criterion for this rehearsal is that the spacecraft flawlessly performs its activities as if it were Pluto with everything the same except that Pluto is not there. The dates in 2013 were carefully chosen so that the times received by Earth would be identical to those of the actual encounter in 2015.
Mission managers wanted scientists and engineers to experience the stress of critical operations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, expected in July 2015. We are flying close to an object that is an enormous distance from Earth and we are trying to hit a box that is 100 by 150 kilometers wide and that then leads to planning maneuvers and the trajectory control needed to thread that needle and hit that little box. It's a long way off, this trial would actually be loading commands to new horizons to instruct the spacecraft to make exactly the same set of observations as in 2015. There is definitely an element of risk involved, but from one point of view, if you didn't do no simulation with the real spacecraft, one could argue that could pose a greater risk.
Because you don't want such a critical activity to only happen once in flight, all of these are invaluable in preparing and practicing for the only chance we'll have to explore the Pluto system we've been waiting for for 12 years. Since we wrote the proposals to do this trial, it is the last big step before we can do the meeting. We think we're about 10 million miles from Pluto and getting

closer

, but so far so good. We are ready for the races. Today is our 2724th flying day, this has been a long time coming, literally, I just want to say thank you for all the work, let them eat cake, July 12, 2013, instead of July 14, 2015.
This is a minute-by-minute simulation of the day of the meeting. or break well is the most important thing because we better have passed the 24 hours of most intense activities that we have been running on the spaceship and this is the longest we have been without contact since we entered. In counterrehearsal, this may be a rehearsal, but New Horizons has been firing its thrusters and spinning in space in maneuvers identical to those planned for 2015. On the day of the encounter, the spacecraft will be too busy taking data to send back images, so It is first simple. m a live message will be very important sometime within the next minute dss 43 you should look at the signal we are fine we are nominal from the spacecraft and it seems that all the observations that we had planned between the last clue and this clue happened this gives us a lot of confidence, at least the spacecraft has been doing all those twists and turns we've been anticipating for the last seven days.
I like to say that on the flyby I don't want to learn anything about Earth. system or the team spacecraft i want to learn just about the pluto system no spacecraft has ever been to pluto nor will it return in our lifetime pluto is every kid's favorite planet, you know, you ask anyone under the age of six and They are going to say Pluto. We don't know exactly what Pluto looks like, but it looks very exciting from the images we have so far from the Hubble Space Telescope. We're really looking forward to getting there and seeing what it really looks like.
If someone says that Pluto is boring or not important, in no way before new horizons come to Pluto, almost everything we think we know about theplanet and its moons is available practically everywhere we have sent a spacecraft on a first reconnaissance mission like this. We discovered that our Earth-based notions were completely wrong, so I'll tell you what we expect, but first of all, what we expect is to be surprised from the 1990s to today. Stern has been consistent in avoiding speculation. He will get the same answer. everyone has received from me for almost 20 years. I make no predictions except one.
My best guess is that we'll find something wonderful, but in the final months leading up to the July 2015 encounter, it's hard for most humans not to imagine what we'll see. Many planetary scientists like Paul Shank based their expectations on what we saw when Voyager 2 reached Neptune and specifically when it passed close to its moon Triton Voyager was a 10-year exploration of the outer solar system and each time they reached a planet. It was basically the first time anyone had actually seen those bodies, so when they arrived at Jupiter they were greeted with huge surprises. The volcanoes erupting in a hallway were completely unexpected and when they reached Uranus there were more surprises.
Miranda's exotic trains. and Ariel, for example, were not expected, so when they arrived at Neptune they were used to the idea that they were going to be surprised and indeed, Triton left them speechless. Bonnie Baratti was at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory when the first images appeared. of triton fell a moon almost 1700 miles in diameter was almost a twin of pluto is about the same size about the same brightness originally triton was probably a Kuiper belt object like pluto floating in space but then got too close to neptune and was captured by Neptune's gravitational field recently. Paul Shank enhanced the original Voyager data to create this detailed Triton flyover.
It has strange patches, not spot-like features, like amoebas crawling across the surface. Triton has very few impact craters. Its surface is extremely. geologically young and actually has geysers that spew material into space here is a body that is hundreds of degrees below zero so cold that it is desolate it is sterile we just didn't expect to see this activity in commerce it was quite a surprise if you just assumed that Pluto was going to look exactly like Triton, which is the most similar object we know of, then you might expect to find a very interesting body, but Triton is not the only dynamic ice world in the outer solar system Sixteen years later, the Cassini spacecraft sent back return.
Images of Enceladus, Saturn's moon, approximately 300 miles in diameter. This is a tiny moon and Enceladus is actually a winter wonderland. It's very bright, reflects almost all the radiation that falls on it, and has these huge ice volcanoes coming out of its south pole and Enceladus. It's continually emitting puffs of water vapor, so if you start seeing puffs of water vapor rising from Pluto as new horizons approach, that would be extremely interesting, but what forces can drive the volcanoes in the system's deep freeze? outer solar Triton and Pluto? Both are balls of ice with presumably rock in the center, so one of the sources of energy is radioactive decay within the rock that gives off heat just as the Earth heats up.
If you let Pluto sit there and pump heat out of the rocks, you'll generate enough energy to melt a couple hundred kilometers of ice. It is still possible to have an ocean beneath a relatively thick ocular layer. The ocular layer could be 100 miles thick. Additionally, over billions of years, the ice sheet becomes thicker and thicker as Pluto cools and in doing so, it squeezes the water underneath and if you squeeze the water too much, it may create fractures and the water could come out of the surface. When you go out to the edge of the solar system, you should expect some surprises and let's see.
They on Pluto, as well as Triton and Enceladus, were mere dots before spacecraft reached them, so far Pluto has been a planet for astronomers that is about to change, we will start as astronomers and use astronomical tools to try to hone in. our images and extract every last detail from these blurry blobs, we gradually go from astronomers to geologists as we get closer and it becomes a real world. Jeff Moore was in the room at JPL when those trident images dropped, but he enjoys it too. field work and believe that we will recognize some similar planetary processes and work on Pluto as on Earth, so I am a geologist and although we do not expect to see oceans on Pluto, there are common processes operating on this planet that will probably also operate on Pluto and its moons While the scales are very different, erosion, landforms here on Earth and throughout the solar system there are these little finger-shaped projections that are formed by the process of erosion where wind and water have sculpted this landscape. taking advantage of small differences in the strength of the original rock creating large fantastic landscapes, such as on Jupiter's moon Callisto, and we can anticipate that we may also see landscapes like this on Pluto and its moons.
Pluto's 248-year orbit is more eccentric. that the terrestrial and gas giant planets of our solar system vary greatly in their distance from the sun, but it is typical of many other objects in the Kuiper belt and of newly discovered planets around other stars that, in addition to their highly angular polar tilt, They combine to produce strong seasonal effects, in fact, the seasons in which Pluto are among the most extreme on any world we know of that orbits the Sun and those extremes may be one of the reasons why its surface is also extremely contrasting. Pluto is perhaps the most intensely bright and dark place we have ever seen. in the solar system, this dark surface accumulates more heat, it heats up like asphalt does on a sunny day here on earth and if there was frost on this dark surface, it heats up and this material is expelled and transported.
It could also be creating wind, so you might see small dunes oriented along the periphery of the dark surface, showing this process in action for planetary scientists. Color may be a clue about the composition of surfaces that cannot be directly sampled on Earth. The colors from red to dark gray are generated entirely by the presence or absence of rust on Pluto. We also see these same color ranges from gray to bright white, yellow to red to black, but it must be due to a completely different process at NASA. Ames Research Center near San Francisco Longtime Pluto researcher Dale Crookshank and postdoc Chris Matarese conduct experiments to see what processes could create the colors we see on Pluto, starting with gases like methane and nitrogen and the extremely low temperatures that we know are there.
In our cold chamber we can produce a thin film of ice and then expose it to a beam of electrons which are charged particles comparable to those that reach the surface of Pluto from space, we discovered that when we irradiate ultraviolet light or electrons on simple molecules. Within a short time, simple molecules are broken down and, through natural processes, reassembled into more complex chemicals. So far, the colors we create in the laboratory by irradiating these ices are quite similar to those we see on Pluto, there are shades of yellow, light brown. through a fairly dark red and if we take the ultraviolet light processing to an extreme degree, the material actually turns black and this is almost the color of pure carbon.
Seeing how radiation transforms simple ices into complex, colorful organic molecules should help interpret the foreground. views of Pluto's surface that will be sent across new horizons color translates into how long these otherwise colorless ices are exposed for a year 10,000 years 10 million years which, in turn, can tell us more about the nature of pluto's surface exposure and even the age of pluto's surface dale crookshank started observing pluto back in 1976 now 39 years later it is ready for its close up we can say that pluto is chemically active chemically dynamic not yet We know if it is geologically active and dynamic but that is.
What are the new horizons going to tell us? We've been surprised like that before, passing by other planetary bodies that we thought were totally cold dead inert worlds, and discovering that there are geysers, there are ice flows, there are cracks and everything. types of evidence of geological activity I can still remember the first time I saw Pluto in a telescope and it was just a small dot that you could barely see. It will be surprising that within a period of hours it will transform from this small point that I study as an astronomer into this enormous geological world that will be able to see volcanoes, faults, ice, mountains and craters.
I mean, it will really be an incredible experience to see it transformed from sophisticated laboratory experiments, from exploring other worlds to applying knowledge of Earth processes, what should we expect when we arrive at Pluto in July 2015? The only thing that would surprise me would be if we were not surprised, but enjoying the scientific surprises that are to come means avoiding dangers in the last millions. miles to Pluto that will be next December 6, 2014 at mission control Alice Bowman and her team wait to get confirmation that New Horizons has emerged from what is called hibernation for two-thirds of its three billion journey of miles most spacecraft systems have been shut down to prevent wear and tear New Horizon scientific instruments send a simple signal once a week just to say I'm still okay.
Alice's team has a unique way of displaying the status of the spacecraft when New Horizons is hibernating. Her pet bear is safely asleep when the spaceship wakes up. in her party hat, if all goes well, this will be the eighteenth time the spaceship and the bear have woken up, but December 2014 is different. NASA VIPs are available. Two film crews document the action as Alan explains the benefits of hibernation. It reduces our cost because it is not necessary to have people taking care of the spacecraft 24 7. External interest in new horizons is growing if all goes well. New Horizons will stay awake flying by Pluto in July 2015 and then return data until October 2016.
Tonight the data arrives and Alice has to wait to be sure that New Horizons is fully awake, we should receive it momentarily, it should be any day now. , it's like watching paint dry. I figure if I look at the screen closely enough, we'll have a nominal awakening of the New Horizons spacecraft underway. heading to pluto our bear will be here for a while this is a decisive day we have completed the cruise through three billion miles of space the spacecraft is now awake finally uh after nine years I'm glad to see the hibernation behind us and There are active operations ahead on Pluto, but there are still hundreds of tasks to ensure a safe flyby in July 2015.
On January 27, New Horizons has been sending technical data and everything seems to be fine, but today is the first time that Hal Weaver and Andy Ching will be looking at new scientific images, yes, let's try that again. Chang is the truck's lead scientist. The glory of the camera is used for navigation to find the targets and correct the trajectory so that we reach the right place at the right time. Voltage, current, temperature. Everything seems normal, without errors. messages, this is, let's see the first images and then sharon right there, maximum pixel 55. that's right, okay, very good, there they are, let's see the set for project scientist hal weaver, even the jump in size of one to two. the pixels were significant this is a real milestone in the new horizons mission the first images of pluto in the year of the pluto encounter had not turned on lori had not obtained any images since last summer last july but this is it, this is the beginning of that is ours, she explodes, we don't really know what we're going to see, that's what this mission is about, what is the surface of Pluto, I really like the size of it, what the orbits really are, so they're just lovely surprises.
It's coming for us, but some of the surprises may not be so welcome as new horizons move ever closer to the Pluto system. Lori will be able to identify small moons and possible rings that cannot be seen from Earth. john spencer leads the you have campaign uhas means unknown dangers, we may find new moons or even rings around Pluto and if we see something like that we will want to determine if it poses a threat to the spacecraftbecause, if you do, there is debris we could run away from. If we find that this could damage or kill the spacecraft, then we want to assess that danger and determine whether we should take any evasive action to find out how vulnerable New Horizons might be to even the smallest dust particles.
The mission sent samples of the spacecraft's components to the white sands. Testing range technicians at White Sands set up weapons tests to assess how vulnerable the outer casings and cables of the New Horizons might be. We went to two facilities that could shoot things at parts of spaceship models, while the results may look dangerous. The mission has choices to make. Evasive action One of the backup strategies that we have if we feel that we need to give the spacecraft additional protection is that we orient it so that the high gain antenna here, which is literally quite bulletproof and can protect the spacecraft, face forward in the direction of ram and this is ram in the sense of ram, it is a direction in which things will come towards us and hit the spacecraft and if that is facing forward, then any dust particles that hit the spacecraft is more likely to hit that antenna where they won't cause us problems and only a small part of the spacecraft around the edges will be exposed to those particles which would protect the innards of the spacecraft but limit the pointing of the cameras.
The cameras are fixed to the spacecraft so the spacecraft has to point in one direction, the cameras can only point in a limited range of directions, this limits the number of times we can photograph the system as we pass because we can only photographing objects when they are at just the right angle that we are at. I can watch them while protecting the spacecraft with the main antenna, another option is to take different trajectories through the pluto system which is called shabbat play shabbat is the best acronym in the space business, it means safe haven for another trajectory and it is the Word that we use to represent our backup plans on Pluto.
The second Shabbat

brings

us much closer to Pluto, to the region where atmospheric drag depletes the orbits of any debris, which we believe would be the safest Hail Mary pass we could fly if we had to do something. different from the nominal one, we are entering the Pluto system with the ability, if we learn something, we do not expect to be able to make a change and get the goods, but those decisions can only be made in the last month before the closest approach and there will be limited time to evaluate the best options, so in February 2015, Spencer's has a team including ring specialist Mark Showalter and postdoc Simon Porter, who are conducting a readiness test now that they are on the clock and are qualified to determine if they can overcome the calculations quickly enough to decide on a trajectory correction maneuver that could prevent mission loss and which makes this exercise more critical than any that have been performed before.
The difference between this and the previous operational readiness tests is that this is where we have to prove to put the project in NASA that we can do this but the only test that really matters comes on July 14, 2015 that one day it will bear fruit 26 years of dreams and nine years of flight for the science team The year of Pluto began with another meeting to review the latest data on the Pluto system and hear updates on how the spacecraft was performing. Mission director Glenn Fountain, who had been with the project since its inception, summarized the remaining risks.
The red boxes are possibilities that could kill the mission, but now, in 2015, there are more and more. More green box risks that have been minimized, something we haven't thought about yet could happen, but I'm sure that whatever happens, whatever fate throws at us, this team will be able to figure it out and we will continue to get wonderful data . When we get to Pluto, we have an incredibly talented team of people who have worked very hard, we have tested the sequences inside and out, and although there are always unknowns, I am very confident and looking forward to the curtain rising along with my mind.
While doubling down on the technical details, there was also a sense of history in the making to document the long years of effort to get this close to Pluto. The mission recreated a photograph of the team taken in 2004, just as Glenn Allen and Alice had carefully planned for many of the scientists back then. and the engineers were still actively engaged in new horizons and were looking forward to July 2015. We have worked hard to get a coherent team because if you don't have a good team to operate the spacecraft and do the planning, you will fail and that's why we worked. a plan at the beginning of the mission to have younger people with the right amount of experience to be on the mission and it's just It's like watching your children grow up, it's like suddenly, where did the time go?
You know they're older, they're more mature, and they're now very experienced veterans, but the hard work of mission planning wasn't even that close to over. Finding the day while exploring Pluto in 2015 is exciting in itself. New Horizons was recommended in part as a mission that could continue further into the Kuiper Belt and that requires identifying potential targets now for an even more distant flyby should NASA approve an extended mission this A challenging task was assigned to John Spencer, Mark Bowie and a team of young postdocs and, like everything else on this mission, it wasn't easy. Bowie and John Spencer had been using the largest telescopes on Earth in Hawaii and Chile, but even the best on Earth couldn't figure this out. task, but the basic problem is that the Earth's atmosphere is a disaster at these scales, there is a limit and that is what we have been banging our heads against now that time is running out, we had to turn to Hubble and therefore , we are not so joking. let's talk about hubble to the rescue without hubble we would not have these marked objects and its young collaborators devised innovative search techniques using custom software what it does is blur the stars and makes the kuiper belt objects stay still many have passed work, but doing something as exciting as this has been a lot of fun.
I've been reviewing the data today because it's new data and I really wanted to know what the answer was. Well we would have been in big trouble if we didn't find the kbo in time so there was pressure but honestly we had the best people in the world working on the problem and we did it and we just do the math, write the software, render the pixels and then I create this graph. and from then on it's what I call wet wear, that's what you have in your head, actually the kbos move against the fixed star marking, came up with a way to make them more obvious by turning them around and doing that the stars seem to move and whatever kbo stays still right in the middle there is something that just stays constant and that is the talk about the Kuiper belt which you can't argue with was a high tech variant of the approach that had been been instrumental in the exploration of the Pluto system from the beginning.
For starters, but in essence it's a technique that hasn't really changed since the days of Tombow. You have two photos of the sky taken at different times and you look for things that move as soon as you see something real, there is absolutely no doubt. about it as soon as it flashes on the screen in just a millisecond there it is, it's real and you know, I found another Kyber belt item, but finding a kbo is only half the battle. Is it located where new horizons can reach it with the fuel once available? you have the orbit, so we know where the spacecraft is and where it will be, we can calculate how much fuel the spacecraft will need to use to get to these objects with more Hubble time, new horizons had a nice surprise.
It looked like we would actually have to burn out the engines to not detect the object, which was a pretty exciting concept. You know, it's a good thing we look because you wouldn't want to run into one of these things, these cold classics are pretty much like they were 4.5 billion years ago. They are small fossils. Is incredible. We have no idea what they will look like. Potential targets were finally found. It was on Pluto. I'm feeling pretty excited right now. Know? You are at the top of the roller coaster, you are about to go down that dizzying and exciting journey into the system, just seeing Pluto there getting bigger and bigger gives me goosebumps today we are just a few months away from the meeting that we are less that one astronomical unit the distance between the Earth and the Sun that distance of this fascinating object is the last major body in our solar system that we really need to visit to lay the cornerstone of the initial recognition of the solar system.
It is reconfortable. and it feels like something that makes a race worthwhile as the spaceship reaches new horizons. It's a very small team, but we've still been working on this for over a decade and if you add it all up it's around two and a half million hours of work. To get to Pluto we have first waited the four years that we could barely think about because we were running so fast and then it's oh, we waited and we waited and now we are ready to start the encounter that we have had delayed gratification. The Pluto year is a beginning and an end simultaneously, it is an end in the sense that we are completing our goal, we are achieving the flyby of the Pluto system for the first time, but it is also the beginning of a completely new chapter for science of actually being able to explore these objects as the data comes in over a period of months, you know, by bringing in postdocs and younger scientists, some of whom were in high school when we started this project and now have their PhDs and are experts spectacular and very talented in what they do.
I was in preschool when Alan first started talking about a mission to Pluto and I finished high school and started college when it was built and in graduate school for the teams that had young people coming into these programs to get the experience. they will be the next generation of explorers we have never been to a kbo we have never been near a kbo this is the most unexplored area in the entire solar system, which is another way of saying this is the most unknown area to which we, as humans, we can get there with spaceships, we can't wait to get to pluto and on July 14 and see what the surface looks like, we are ready to go and it's show time, we are able to continue an adventure that

humanity

started 100,000 years ago when our ancestors left Africa and we continued that exploration and this country is at the forefront of doing so so you

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