Rise and shine, New Horizons, you’re almost at Pluto!
Hey guys, Amy here for DNews.
Whether or not you think Pluto is a planet, it’s a fascinating little body, and after
eight years, the first ever dedicated mission to the dwarf planet, New Horizons, is waking
up from hibernation to start it’s main mission.
It’s sort of a landmark moment.
Since it launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons has spent 1,873 days in hibernation.
That’s about two thirds of its flight lifetime!
Hibernation mode is vital on a mission like this because Pluto is really far away.
1 AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth, And Pluto never comes closer than 29.7 AU
to the Sun.
At it’s furthest, it’s 49.3 AU!
Keeping the spacecraft in an unpowered, hibernating state while it crosses these insanely large
distances is crucial for conserving power and reducing wear and tear on spacecraft systems
to keep it healthy.
But it isn’t exactly just powered off.
Onboard flight computers have been monitoring the systems’ health and sending a weekly
beacon-status tone back to Earth.
And of course, it’s woken up for some exciting moments like encounters with Jupiter and Saturn.
But this is the big one.
We’re at Pluto’s doorstep and about to get into some really exciting science.
New Horizons is set to wake up at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on December 6.
At the time it will be 2.9 billion miles from Earth, but just a relatively short hop from
Pluto; it will be 162 million miles from the dwarf planet.
Once it wakes, it will send an electronic word back to Earth confirming it’s in active
mode, then the team will run systems checks and get data back that’s been stored on
the spacecraft.
Then before you know it we’ll be at Pluto.
This is actually going to a really exciting mission.
Not only is this the first ever dedicated mission to Pluto, this is the first spacecraft
to go beyond Saturn since the Voyager spacecraft reached the outer solar system in the 1980s.
And needless to say, the instruments on New Horizons are far more modern and updated than
those aboard the Voyagers that were built and launched in the 1970s.
But more than just great data, we’re going to learn some really neat things.
Pluto and its largest moon Charon are a binary system the same way the Earth and the Moon
are, the only other such pair in the solar system.
Pluto’s scant atmosphere is also escaping from the little planet extremely quickly,
much in the same way scientists think the atmosphere poured off the early Earth.
It’s quite possible that New Horizons’ close encounter with Pluto in July of 2015
will teach us as much about our now planet as it will about the dwarf planet.
It’s definitely a mission to watch.
Are you guys excited for New Horizons’ encounter with Pluto next summer?
Let us know in the comments below or you can catch me on Twitter as @astVintageSpace.
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