In a span of 30 years — from the first moon rockets in 1959 to the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 — NASA spacecraft introduced the world to close-up views of the bodies in our solar system.
Beginning as early as April of next year, its New Horizons spacecraft will be sending images of the last unexplored planet — Pluto.
“Planet” is what the mission team called Pluto at a news conference Thursday at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Tucson.
“Planetary scientists consider it a planet, and how about the public?” asked Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, who is principal investigator for the mission, which will make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14.
Stern related a colleague’s prediction that “the public will discover it was a planet all along” when the spacecraft begins sending photos and movies of the dwarf planet and its moons.
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Five moons of Pluto, including its giant close companion Charon, are known. Scientists expect to find more on this mission and send recognizable photos of the planet and its satellites.
So far, the best view anyone has seen is a blurry image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Images “better than Hubble” will be streamed to Earth, beginning in April and increasing in clarity as the spacecraft gets closer, said Hal Weaver, project scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
The spacecraft is currently in hibernation, but is programmed to wake itself up on Dec. 6, said Alice Bowman, mission operations manager. At that point, it will have traveled 2.9 billion miles in nearly nine years since its January 2006 launch.
In addition to its cameras, the piano-sized spacecraft carries what Joel Parker, project manager from the Southwest Research Institute, described as a “phenomenal package of instruments with low mass, low power and exceptional capability.”
It will image Pluto in a variety of wavelengths, and examine its surface and atmospheric chemistry and physics.
It is the “most science power that has been brought to bear on a first discovery mission,” said Stern.
Stern called it a true discovery mission. “Our knowledge of Pluto is quite meager. We know very, very little about this world.”
New Horizons had already launched when the International Astronomical Union voted in a new definition of “planet” in August 2006.
Pluto was deemed a “dwarf planet” by the group, because of its position in the Kuiper Belt of similar objects, and, specifically, because it had not cleared its orbit of other objects.
Stern said he considers this a planetary mission and the other three members agreed when he asked for a show of hands.
Joel Parker, of Southwest Research Institute, said Pluto has “dual citizenship.” It is the last of the planets to be visited and the first of the Kuiper Belt dwarf planets, he said.
