On July 14th 2015, NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft made history as it flew within 7,800 miles of the dwarf planet Pluto. The spacecraft passed by Pluto at 7:49 am EDT and remained silent until 8:52 pm EDT, when it made contact with mission controllers. At that time it informed them that it had completed the flyby and had performed all assigned tasks. The flyby makes the New Horizons Spacecraft the first to visit Pluto. The US has now visited every planet in the solar system.
The New Horizons Spacecraft was launched in January of 2006. It has spent the last 9 1/2 years traversing 2.97 billion miles in order to complete its historic mission. During the hours that the spacecraft was out of contact, it was busy preforming tasks and taking pictures, which it has begun to transmit back to Earth. The down link speed of transmission is about two kilobits per second and it take data 4 hours to reach the Earth from Pluto. At that rate, mission controllers expect that it will take 16 months to retrieve all of the data.
The first photos sent back by the New Horizons Spacecraft have yielded some surprises. The surface of Pluto has mountain ranges composed of water ice that are 11,000 ft high. Even more surprising is that, so far, there is no evidence of any impact craters. Pluto has five moons, the largest of which, Charon is almost the same size as Pluto. The photos have revealed that it has some puzzling features of its own. Charon has cliffs that run for hundreds of miles across and canyons that are four to six miles deep.
The New Horizons Spacecraft is reportedly already a million miles beyond Pluto on its way to its real mission objective which is to explore the Kuiper Belt.
No comments:
Post a Comment