New Horizons is now the first spacecraft to ever begin a flyby of Pluto and its attendant family of moons. The vehicle will make its closest approach to the icy dwarf on July 14, 2015.
When New Horizons makes its closest approach to the distant frozen world, the vehicle will be 4.67 billion miles from our home planet. The spacecraft is currently about 135 million miles away from its target.
New Horizons was launched in January 2006, when Pluto was still classified as a planet - the last to never be visited by a vehicle from the human race. Soon after leaving Earth, New Horizons sped through space as the fastest vehicle ever developed by the human race.
"NASA first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankind's first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system. The New Horizons team worked very hard to prepare for this first phase, and they did it flawlessly," Jim Green, director of the planetary science division at NASA's headquarters in Washington DC, said.
The Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (Lorri) camera attached to the spacecraft will provide astronomers an opportunity to take images of the system with increasing detail as the vehicle approaches the bodies. Mission controllers will take the first image of Pluto and its moons on January 25. Astronomers know of five moons in the system, and New Horizons may discover additional satellites.
"We've completed the longest journey any spacecraft has flown from Earth to reach its primary target, and we are ready to begin exploring," Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, stated in a NASA press release.
Even the Hubble Space Telescope can not distinguish details on Pluto, and New Horizons promises to reveal the system like never before. The first images taken by the Lorri camera will show Pluto and its satellites as small points of light. Astronomers will use the instrument to take hundreds of images of Pluto over the next few months. Detail should begin to show in photos starting in May, according to NASA officials.
For the first time, images taken by the vehicle will be used to help pinpoint New Horizon's exact position in space. These measurements need to be exact to calibrate computer commands for the upcoming flyby.
In addition to Lorri, other instruments aboard the vehicle include Ralph, a imager/spectrometer that will record the flyby in visible and infrared light. Ultraviolet images will be recorded by another instruments, dubbed Alice by mission managers. The Radio Science Experiment (Rex) will study the thin atmosphere of Pluto, while the Solar Wind Around Pluto (Swap) instrument will examine the interaction of solar wind with the icy dwarf. Plasma escaping from the frozen bodies will be detailed by the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (Pepssi), and the Student Dust Counter (SDC), designed by students, will measure space dust in the region.
