The first spacecraft designed to study Pluto, the solar system’s farthest planet, took the first steps on a long journey in January last year and now NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is on course to zip by gigantic Jupiter early next year.
Engineers and scientists are plotting out an agenda of at-Jupiter investigations. Thanks to high-tech instruments onboard the craft, new looks at the gas giant are slated, as are views of several moons circling the planet.
The scientific community has put high priority on exploring the frontier that is the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt beyond, and here they are getting closer to achieving this historic exploration.
If all goes as planned, the New Horizons observatory designed by researchers at Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory will fly past Pluto in July 2015, sending back the first data ever from our solar system’s frozen dwarf. New Horizons will fly past Pluto for the first reconnaissance of that strange little ball of ice and rock, snapping pictures, mapping its terrain, analyzing its atmosphere, and sampling space dust and the solar wind. For nine months after it will transmit data back to Earth as it races toward an even more distant region of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt, where scientists hope to extend its mission.
A little worry right now is that New Horizons is using two of its 16 thrusters more than expected, but every instrument must work to near perfection as in-flight repair will be all but impossible.
Pluto’s mission is important because it may represent a large sample of the original gas and dust from which the sun and planets formed, so scientists have been searching for some way to get a close look and perhaps answer major questions. What was the process of early planet formation? What is the history of volatile compounds, especially water, across the solar system?
It always looks like each of these missions is like a dog that’s just caught a car. You chase it, you grab it, you congratulate yourself, then you think, OK, we’ve got it ... now what? May be nobody knows the answer but still we have to keep chasing!
Via: Space
