[Bryan See]

Hey, guys. You may not have heard in the recent months that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is now approaching Pluto, which was demoted from a planet status in 2006. On July 14, it will make a historic close approach to the dwarf planet.

Here's the image of Pluto/Charon:

Source: LORRI Images from the Pluto Encounter (displayed in raw form without special stretching)

Did you see that, Pluto and Charon gets bigger in raw images!

We'll keep you updated about New Horizons' flyby of Pluto.

[Bobboau]

Theme song for this thread:

[Bryan See]

Thanks, Bobboau. I liked it

Check out this video from NASA:

[StarSlayer]

YTMNPluto

[Luis Dias]

They have their twitter account as well for anyone into that kind of source https://twitter.com/NewHorizons2015

[watsisname]

I'd been curious about how the image scale of Pluto would change with time as we get closer to the flyby, so I put together a couple of plots.  These assume a constant Pluto-relative velocity of 13.8km/s (good assumption; New Horizon's is going WAY faster than the escape speed) and a closest approach distance of 12472km (current objective if no debris hazard avoidance maneuvers are required).




Currently we're 21 days out and the angular size of Pluto is about 20 arcseconds (comparable to the size of Saturn as seen from Earth!).  This will improve to about 10 degrees at closest approach. But given New Horizon's fast speed and Pluto's small size, that good view will only last for a few minutes!  And we get a 1° view for about 5 hours.

That's a very short encounter for such a long time waiting.  Interplanetary travel is crazy.

[Mongoose]

Yeah, it's a pity that we can't flip on the infinite-fuel cheat and magic up some massive delta-v to get into orbit and hang around for a while.  But even the little time we have there should give us some amazing pictures.  The cool part is that the closest fly-by is right before my birthday, so I'll get some pretty pictures to look at as presents.

[Goober5000]

Just be aware that it will take over a year to return all the data from the flyby.  (This is one of the more insane facts about this mission.)  During the flyby itself, New Horizons will be storing all the data to its on-board memory.  It can only return that data in a trickle because the power of the radio signal is so much weaker at Pluto.

And if the extended mission to fly past another KBO is approved, the situation will be even more constrained in 2019!

[Goober5000]

A promotional video from the maker of "Wanderers":

[NGTM-1R]

Yeah, it's a pity that we can't flip on the infinite-fuel cheat and magic up some massive delta-v to get into orbit and hang around for a while.  But even the little time we have there should give us some amazing pictures.  The cool part is that the closest fly-by is right before my birthday, so I'll get some pretty pictures to look at as presents.

Yeah, having looked into this stuff for writing, holy crap does the willingness to do constant burns improve your life.

[Luis Dias]

[X3N0-Life-Form]

*Insert Mass Effect joke*

[Luis Dias]

[Luis Dias]

19.7 million kms from target.

[Cyborg17]

I'm so anxious!  It's such a quick flyby!  What if a programmer goofed up?  What if we miss our chance?  What if the pictures are really horrible??  What if it's just a boring grey blob??   

[Luis Dias]

WHAT IF IT'S JUST A PLANET WITH FEATURES ON IT?

[Goober5000]

I'm so anxious!  It's such a quick flyby!  What if a programmer goofed up?  What if we miss our chance?  What if the pictures are really horrible??  What if it's just a boring grey blob??   

Then lobby for another Pluto mission!

Or lobby for a Neptune orbiter.  That would have plenty of chances to study Triton, which scientists think is a captured KBO.

[Luis Dias]

[watsisname]

Hopefully the only glitch on this mission just happened:

The New Horizons spacecraft experienced an anomaly the afternoon of July 4 that led to a loss of communication with Earth. Communication has since been reestablished and the spacecraft is healthy.

The mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, lost contact with the unmanned spacecraft -- now 10 days from arrival at Pluto -- at 1:54 p.m. EDT, and regained communications with New Horizons at 3:15 p.m. EDT, through NASA’s Deep Space Network.

During that time the autonomous autopilot on board the spacecraft recognized a problem and – as it’s programmed to do in such a situation - switched from the main to the backup computer. The autopilot placed the spacecraft in “safe mode,” and commanded the backup computer to reinitiate communication with Earth. New Horizons then began to transmit telemetry to help engineers diagnose the problem. 

A New Horizons Anomaly Review Board (ARB) was convened at 4 p.m. EDT to gather information on the problem and initiate a recovery plan. The team is now working to return New Horizons to its original flight plan. Due to the 9-hour, round trip communication delay that results from operating a spacecraft almost 3 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, full recovery is expected to take from one to several days; New Horizons will be temporarily unable to collect science data during that time.

Status updates will be issued as new information is available.

Very scary for this to happen only 9 days from the flyby.  Unless it's not a coincidence?  Maybe Pluto is reacting to our sending it a lump of Plutonium...

[Bobboau]

yeah, how would we react to a lump of plutonium arriving at low relativistic speeds on something approching a colision path from a distant part of the solar system we never considered possible for life to survive in