NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by, capture images of Pluto

An image captured by the New Horizons spacecraft and rolled out by NASA on Saturday, displays Pluto’s mystifying dark spots, which are regularly spaced apart and around 300 miles across each. The curtain hasn’t been pulled back like this since NASA’s Voyager 2 shed light on Neptune in 1989.

Colorado scientists have a lot riding on the space mission scheduled to rendezvous with Pluto on Tuesday, including the imaging instrument providing the “eyes” of the New Horizons mission, a stardust counter built and operated by CU-Boulder students, and the power generator for the spacecraft.

Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said Sunday that the mission’s data confirms previous discoveries that Charon is covered in water ice.

Pluto’s moon Charon, the largest of its five known satellites, is also becoming a spectacle. “From a philosophical point of view, it’s the completion of humanity’s first reconnaissance of all the planets in the original solar system, something we started just 50 years ago”, Parker said.

Tombaugh died in 1997, and his widow watched in tears in 2006 as a rocket carrying the New Horizons craft lifted off from Cape Canaveral. That comet, Parker explained, is in some ways more pristine than Pluto – it came from the Kuiper Belt, as many comets do, and it only really changes when it makes a rare pass close to the sun’s heat.

Even after the spacecraft whizzes by, the data and pictures will keep coming in for another 16 months, Stern told NPR’s Science Friday. Well, the newest image released by the New Horizons team suggests Pluto’s largest moon is absolutely that.

Scientists expect image resolution to improve dramatically by Tuesday. That alone is not surprising (in fact, craters were one of the team’s top predictions for surface features on Charon), but the size and color are intriguing. “It’s 60 by 90 miles, and we’re going 30,000 mph, and we’re trying to hit that box within a plus or minus 100 seconds”.

The planets in the solar system travel in elliptical orbits, not flawless circles, so the distance between their paths changes. During this time it will not only observe Pluto and Charon, but also concentrate at the lesser moons in the system: Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra, the mission control team said during the briefing. More detailed images that New Horizons will take around the time of closest approach to the moon on July 14 may provide hints about the dark region’s origin.

The crater’s floor is significantly darker than the surrounding area, perhaps because the impact that gouged out the crater exposed different material than that found on the surface. His two children, now in their 70s, plan to be at Johns Hopkins for the encounter. The amount of sunlight that reaches Pluto is so dim that at high noon it looks like twilight here on Earth. In other words, the spacecraft needs to deploy its instruments at exactly the right times to get all the data it’s tasked with collecting. And on July 14, the spacecraft will fly past Pluto for an up-close-and-personal photo shoot.

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