The rendezvous of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft with Pluto is an important milestone that offered more insights about the extraterrestrial world. The spacecraft made a historic flyby of the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14 gathering data that revealed flowing glaciers of nitrogen ice and hazy skies, among others. It also sent back to Earth images of Pluto taken at close proximity.
Launched on Jan. 19, 2006, the New Horizons mission aims to study the worlds at the edge of the solar system with the first ever reconnaissance of the Pluto system.
Here are 10 videos that will provide a better understanding of Pluto and the New Horizons' mission, which was basically launched to find out where Pluto and its moons fit in with other objects in the solar system.
New Horizons' travelled nine years from Earth to reach Pluto and while the journey may have appeared to have been easily executed, getting the spacecraft to the dwarf planet is not an easy task. Here’s an explanation on how scientists managed to get New Horizons to Pluto.
Although the New Horizons focused on studying Pluto’s largest moon Charon, the dwarf planet actually has four other moons that are completely dwarfed by Charon, which is about half the size of Pluto. The spacecraft provided data that now allow scientist to learn more about the characteristics of these smaller moons including their size.
Prior to New Horizons’ arrival to the Pluto system, many scientists thought that Charon would be an uninteresting cratered body. However, close up and detailed images taken by the probe revealed that Charon is more interesting than previously believed.
Images of Pluto are crucial to unraveling its secrets and New Horizons' long-range imaging camera called Lorri plays an important role in capturing images of the dwarf planet, where sunlight is a thousand time fainter than on Earth.
Scientists were already aware that Pluto’s atmosphere consists largely of methane and nitrogen but the New Horizons mission revealed that the level of methane is higher than expected and nitrogen is a bit lower than initially thought, which means that the dwarf planet’s atmosphere is cooler than expected.
The mission team anticipated finding craters on Pluto. Instead, they found mountains, and unlike those found on Earth, these mountains are composed of water ice.
New Horizons has to have a way to contact scientists back on Earth. Here’s how the spacecraft communicate with scientists 3 billion miles away.
The first ever images of another world were taken by Mariner 4 in 1965 when it flew by Mars and captured photos of its surface. Five decades later, New Horizons is returning the most stunning photos of another world ever taken by a space mission.
New Horizons is basically conducting scientific study as it flies by Pluto and the suit of seven instruments it carries is crucial to learning more about the dwarf planet.
It took nearly a decade for New Horizons to reach Pluto only for it to fly by and not get into orbit. Here’s why:
