More of the same..
This ^^ is where the spacecraft live.
This ^^ is where the spacecraft live.
NASA & World Space Exploration...News, Views, Photos & videos
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
It;s kinda sad. Those Birds never have and never will fly.
the one that came closest was crushed.
They should be in a Museum, Perhaps the Russians would be willing to sell them as mounted displays down the line.
the one that came closest was crushed.
They should be in a Museum, Perhaps the Russians would be willing to sell them as mounted displays down the line.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Photo Credit: Michael Seeley / SpaceFlight Insider
JASON RHIAN
JULY 2ND, 2015
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla — NASA announced late in the day on Thursday, July 2, that in-flight abort test would move from Vandenberg Air Force Base’s Space Launch Complex 4E in California to Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39A in Florida.
has reported that it is not known at present when the in-flight abort test will be carried out. However, it will likely take place later than this fall when the test had been scheduled to take place.
Before the in-flight abort test takes place, SpaceX will launch an orbital test flight of the crew-rated dragon (without the crew). Once that mission has been completed and that Dragon has been recovered and restored, it will be used on the in-flight abort test.
Whereas the launch pad abort test on May 6, 2015, demonstrated the crew-rated Dragon’s ability to lift astronauts away from an accident at the launch site, the in-flight abort test will validate the craft’s ability to do the same – from a launch vehicle on ascent.
If everything goes according to plan, the Falcon 9 will lift off from LC-39A and, at about a minute-and-a-half into the flight, when the booster is passing through the period of the flight known as maximum dynamic pressure or “max-Q” – the abort system will be activated. The Dragon spacecraft will then pull away from the Falcon 9, deploy its parachutes and splash down in the Atlantic Ocean.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Miragedriver
Brigadier
On the track with Einstein gravitational waves
(Defensa.com) With LISA Technology (LTP) Package, Airbus Defence and Space has delivered the core of scientific LISA Pathfinder spacecraft that will test the technology with which to observe from space described by Einstein's gravitational waves. Beyond this check, the ability to measure the gravitational radiation will allow astronomers to study our universe in a completely different way. Future systems of telescopes can observe exotic objects such as colliding black holes or neutron stars as never before possible.
The LTP has been installed on the satellite has also built Airbus Defence and Space. Both LTP as the satellite itself must now prove its operational suitability in a complete series of tests at the company IABG in Ottobrunn, near Munich (Germany). LISA Pathfinder is laying the foundation of a great space observatory that will ultimately be observed directly and accurately measure gravitational waves. These tiny distortions in space-time technology require highly sensitive and highly accurate measurement and operation can only be tested in a space environment without interference.
The LTP weighs approximately 150 kilos and basically comprises a laser interferometer which will measure changes in the distance between two test cubes gold / platinum high accuracy, having a weight of 1.96 kilos each. Once in orbit, the two proof masses are released by a release mechanism delicate and kept in position by a weak electrostatic field can be controlled very precisely. The interferometric laser and electrostatic sensors monitor the movement of proof masses inside the satellite, making sure that the test masses remain outside any disturbance. The interferometer can measure the relative position and orientation of the test masses which are spaced about 40 centimeters each other- with a high degree of very high precision (<0.01 nanometers, less than one-millionth the thickness of a human hair ).
The launch of LISA Pathfinder is scheduled for autumn 2015. Once in orbit, a propulsion module dedicated LISA Pathfinder will carry about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, away from any interference from our planet. Airbus Defence and Space in UK was chosen by the European Space Agency (ESA) to build the LISA Pathfinder and is also responsible for the supply of integrated turnkey satellite. ESA and the German Aerospace Center have ordered Airbus Defence and Space in Germany address for LTP systems, developed with contributions from various European research institutes.
Link:
Back to bottling my Grenache
(Defensa.com) With LISA Technology (LTP) Package, Airbus Defence and Space has delivered the core of scientific LISA Pathfinder spacecraft that will test the technology with which to observe from space described by Einstein's gravitational waves. Beyond this check, the ability to measure the gravitational radiation will allow astronomers to study our universe in a completely different way. Future systems of telescopes can observe exotic objects such as colliding black holes or neutron stars as never before possible.
The LTP has been installed on the satellite has also built Airbus Defence and Space. Both LTP as the satellite itself must now prove its operational suitability in a complete series of tests at the company IABG in Ottobrunn, near Munich (Germany). LISA Pathfinder is laying the foundation of a great space observatory that will ultimately be observed directly and accurately measure gravitational waves. These tiny distortions in space-time technology require highly sensitive and highly accurate measurement and operation can only be tested in a space environment without interference.
The LTP weighs approximately 150 kilos and basically comprises a laser interferometer which will measure changes in the distance between two test cubes gold / platinum high accuracy, having a weight of 1.96 kilos each. Once in orbit, the two proof masses are released by a release mechanism delicate and kept in position by a weak electrostatic field can be controlled very precisely. The interferometric laser and electrostatic sensors monitor the movement of proof masses inside the satellite, making sure that the test masses remain outside any disturbance. The interferometer can measure the relative position and orientation of the test masses which are spaced about 40 centimeters each other- with a high degree of very high precision (<0.01 nanometers, less than one-millionth the thickness of a human hair ).
The launch of LISA Pathfinder is scheduled for autumn 2015. Once in orbit, a propulsion module dedicated LISA Pathfinder will carry about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, away from any interference from our planet. Airbus Defence and Space in UK was chosen by the European Space Agency (ESA) to build the LISA Pathfinder and is also responsible for the supply of integrated turnkey satellite. ESA and the German Aerospace Center have ordered Airbus Defence and Space in Germany address for LTP systems, developed with contributions from various European research institutes.
Link:
Back to bottling my Grenache
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Musk: Falcon 9 rocket failure a “huge blow” to SpaceX
Posted on July 7, 2015 by
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket broke apart approximately 139 seconds after launch June 28. Credit: Walter Scriptunas II/
Speaking publicly for the first time since a Falcon 9 rocket failure that destroyed a Dragon cargo capsule for the International Space Station, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Tuesday that engineers are still piecing together what happened during the June 28 accident in hopes of announcing more details within a few days.
The rocket failure occurred minutes after liftoff from Cape Canaveral — the first such mishap in the Falcon 9’s 19 missions to date — causing the booster to disintegrate 45 kilometers (28 miles) over the Atlantic Ocean.
“Obviously, this is a huge blow to SpaceX, and we take these missions incredibly seriously,” Musk said in a question and answer session Tuesday at an International Space Station conference in Boston. “Everyone that can engage in the investigation at SpaceX is very, very focused on that. In this case, the data does seem to be quite difficult to interpret. Whatever happened is clearly not a simple, straightforward thing, so we want to spend as much time as possible just reviewing the data.”
Echoing earlier statements by SpaceX, Musk said the company has enlisted help from NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and other customers in the investigation.
He said engineers will “look at both what we think most likely happened, and then anything that’s a close call, and then try to address all of those things and maximize the probability of success on future missions.”
Musk hopes to release more details on the failure by the end of this week after further data analysis and engineering reviews.
“At this point, the only thing that’s really clear was there was some kind of over-pressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank, but the exact cause and sequence of events, there’s still no clear theory that fits with all the data,” Musk said. “So we have to determine if some of the data is a measurement error of some kind, or if there’s actually a theory that matches what appear to be conflicting data points.”
Musk did not address how long the Falcon 9 rocket might be grounded in the aftermath of the accident while engineers find the cause and implement corrective actions. SpaceX officials have said they informed customers booked to fly on upcoming Falcon 9 launches to expect delays of a few months.
File photo of SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk. Credit: Gene Blevins/LA Daily News
“As soon as we’ve got a clear line on what happened … we’ll certainly put out that story,” Musk said. “My only reticence about saying something quite yet is I don’t want to say something that subsequently turns out to be a misunderstanding of the situation.”
SpaceX officials said recovery teams in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral have retrieved debris from the launch failure, but the wreckage is small and likely holds few clues to the cause of the anomaly. Instead, engineers are focused on analyzing more than 3,000 channels of telemetry, including on-board video sources, to re-construct the flight timeline.
“The biggest thing that’s needed in the short term is the ability to just gather all the data, and create a very precise timeline, so that, by the millisecond, we know what each sensor was reading, and we can correlate that with ground video,” Musk said. “One of the biggest challenges is matching things to the exact time.
“When you’re dealing in milliseconds, all that stuff actually makes quite a bit of difference, so that’s the biggest effort we’ve been engaged in so far — just creating a super-detailed timeline,” Musk said.
Michael Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager, said the research outpost is doing fine without the more than 4,000 pounds of cargo lost aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
The supplies lost included a new docking ring designed to receive future commercial crew capsules in development by Boeing and SpaceX. A second docking adapter is already built awaiting launch, and spare parts exist to assemble a third unit, officials said.
A spacesuit, components needed to repair the lab’s water filtration system, food and crew provisions, and experiments also went down in the Dragon spacecraft.
The Falcon 9 failure was the second in back-to-back failures on missions to resupply the space station. A Russian Progress cargo freighter spun out of control in late April.
NASA contracted with SpaceX and Orbital ATK to deliver logistics to the space station after the retirement of the space shuttle. Orbital had its own launch failure in October 2014, in which an Antares supply rocket heading for the space station crashed just after blastoff from Virginia.
“We’re still doing research on ISS, the crew is healthy, the vehicle is healthy, and unfortunately we have lost, in the last eight months, three vehicles,” Suffredini said, adding the failures have had a “big impact” on the space station program.
The string of failures since October 2014 came after just one lost mission to the space station in the previous 16 years, a period in which more than 150 launches went up to build and outfit the complex.
“As a program, we always assumed we’d lose one or two logistics vehicles and that we’d have to deal with that,” Suffredini said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we’d lose three in eight months, but you deal with the cards that are dealt, so that’s where we are today.”
Russia’s Progress resupply freighter returned to flight with a successful launch July 3. It docked with the space station two days later with nearly three tons of fuel, oxygen, food and experiments.
Three new crew members are due to depart for the space station July 22 aboard a Russian Soyuz ferry capsule, raising the lab’s crew back to six residents.
Then attention turns to a Japanese resupply launch scheduled for Aug. 16. Japan’s HTV cargo freighter is the biggest supply transporter in the space station’s fleet, and Suffredini said managers have adjusted some of the spaceship’s load to make up for items lost on earlier missions.
He assured researchers that officials made only minor changes to the complement of experiments manifested on the HTV flight, removing some hardware to be used for research next year. That cargo can be flown to the space station on a later mission, Suffredini said.
“All the research on HTV remains,” Suffredini said. “We did have to modify some of the other supplies to make sure we have everything we needed.”
Before the end of the year — even if no SpaceX missions launch — three more cargo deliveries are on tap. The space station is scheduled to receive two more Progress supply vehicles in September and November, and Orbital ATK’s Cygnus logistics carrier is set for launch in early December aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
Orbital ATK contracted with ULA to launch the resupply flight while engineers redesign the company’s Antares booster for new engines in the wake of last year’s launch failure. Officials expect the Antares rocket to resume launching in March 2016.
Under NASA’s deals with SpaceX and Orbital ATK, the space agency can withhold a final payment to the contractor if a cargo flight fails, but the companies are not required to refly a mission.
Email the author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: .
Posted on July 7, 2015 by
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket broke apart approximately 139 seconds after launch June 28. Credit: Walter Scriptunas II/
Speaking publicly for the first time since a Falcon 9 rocket failure that destroyed a Dragon cargo capsule for the International Space Station, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Tuesday that engineers are still piecing together what happened during the June 28 accident in hopes of announcing more details within a few days.
The rocket failure occurred minutes after liftoff from Cape Canaveral — the first such mishap in the Falcon 9’s 19 missions to date — causing the booster to disintegrate 45 kilometers (28 miles) over the Atlantic Ocean.
“Obviously, this is a huge blow to SpaceX, and we take these missions incredibly seriously,” Musk said in a question and answer session Tuesday at an International Space Station conference in Boston. “Everyone that can engage in the investigation at SpaceX is very, very focused on that. In this case, the data does seem to be quite difficult to interpret. Whatever happened is clearly not a simple, straightforward thing, so we want to spend as much time as possible just reviewing the data.”
Echoing earlier statements by SpaceX, Musk said the company has enlisted help from NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and other customers in the investigation.
He said engineers will “look at both what we think most likely happened, and then anything that’s a close call, and then try to address all of those things and maximize the probability of success on future missions.”
Musk hopes to release more details on the failure by the end of this week after further data analysis and engineering reviews.
“At this point, the only thing that’s really clear was there was some kind of over-pressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank, but the exact cause and sequence of events, there’s still no clear theory that fits with all the data,” Musk said. “So we have to determine if some of the data is a measurement error of some kind, or if there’s actually a theory that matches what appear to be conflicting data points.”
Musk did not address how long the Falcon 9 rocket might be grounded in the aftermath of the accident while engineers find the cause and implement corrective actions. SpaceX officials have said they informed customers booked to fly on upcoming Falcon 9 launches to expect delays of a few months.
File photo of SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk. Credit: Gene Blevins/LA Daily News
“As soon as we’ve got a clear line on what happened … we’ll certainly put out that story,” Musk said. “My only reticence about saying something quite yet is I don’t want to say something that subsequently turns out to be a misunderstanding of the situation.”
SpaceX officials said recovery teams in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral have retrieved debris from the launch failure, but the wreckage is small and likely holds few clues to the cause of the anomaly. Instead, engineers are focused on analyzing more than 3,000 channels of telemetry, including on-board video sources, to re-construct the flight timeline.
“The biggest thing that’s needed in the short term is the ability to just gather all the data, and create a very precise timeline, so that, by the millisecond, we know what each sensor was reading, and we can correlate that with ground video,” Musk said. “One of the biggest challenges is matching things to the exact time.
“When you’re dealing in milliseconds, all that stuff actually makes quite a bit of difference, so that’s the biggest effort we’ve been engaged in so far — just creating a super-detailed timeline,” Musk said.
Michael Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager, said the research outpost is doing fine without the more than 4,000 pounds of cargo lost aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
The supplies lost included a new docking ring designed to receive future commercial crew capsules in development by Boeing and SpaceX. A second docking adapter is already built awaiting launch, and spare parts exist to assemble a third unit, officials said.
A spacesuit, components needed to repair the lab’s water filtration system, food and crew provisions, and experiments also went down in the Dragon spacecraft.
The Falcon 9 failure was the second in back-to-back failures on missions to resupply the space station. A Russian Progress cargo freighter spun out of control in late April.
NASA contracted with SpaceX and Orbital ATK to deliver logistics to the space station after the retirement of the space shuttle. Orbital had its own launch failure in October 2014, in which an Antares supply rocket heading for the space station crashed just after blastoff from Virginia.
“We’re still doing research on ISS, the crew is healthy, the vehicle is healthy, and unfortunately we have lost, in the last eight months, three vehicles,” Suffredini said, adding the failures have had a “big impact” on the space station program.
The string of failures since October 2014 came after just one lost mission to the space station in the previous 16 years, a period in which more than 150 launches went up to build and outfit the complex.
“As a program, we always assumed we’d lose one or two logistics vehicles and that we’d have to deal with that,” Suffredini said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we’d lose three in eight months, but you deal with the cards that are dealt, so that’s where we are today.”
Russia’s Progress resupply freighter returned to flight with a successful launch July 3. It docked with the space station two days later with nearly three tons of fuel, oxygen, food and experiments.
Three new crew members are due to depart for the space station July 22 aboard a Russian Soyuz ferry capsule, raising the lab’s crew back to six residents.
Then attention turns to a Japanese resupply launch scheduled for Aug. 16. Japan’s HTV cargo freighter is the biggest supply transporter in the space station’s fleet, and Suffredini said managers have adjusted some of the spaceship’s load to make up for items lost on earlier missions.
He assured researchers that officials made only minor changes to the complement of experiments manifested on the HTV flight, removing some hardware to be used for research next year. That cargo can be flown to the space station on a later mission, Suffredini said.
“All the research on HTV remains,” Suffredini said. “We did have to modify some of the other supplies to make sure we have everything we needed.”
Before the end of the year — even if no SpaceX missions launch — three more cargo deliveries are on tap. The space station is scheduled to receive two more Progress supply vehicles in September and November, and Orbital ATK’s Cygnus logistics carrier is set for launch in early December aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
Orbital ATK contracted with ULA to launch the resupply flight while engineers redesign the company’s Antares booster for new engines in the wake of last year’s launch failure. Officials expect the Antares rocket to resume launching in March 2016.
Under NASA’s deals with SpaceX and Orbital ATK, the space agency can withhold a final payment to the contractor if a cargo flight fails, but the companies are not required to refly a mission.
Email the author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: .
Miragedriver
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Flaring, active regions of the sun highlighted in this new image combining observations from several telescopes. High-energy X-rays from Nasa's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) are shown in blue; low-energy X-rays from Japan's Hinode spacecraft are green; and extreme ultraviolet light from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is yellow and red. All three telescopes captured their solar images around the same time in April 2015.
Picture: JPL Caltech/Nasa
Back to bottling my Grenache
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Miragedriver
Brigadier
It's showtime for Pluto; prepare to be amazed by NASA flyby
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Pluto, reveal thyself, and Earthlings, enjoy the show.
On Tuesday, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will sweep past Pluto and present the previously unexplored world in all its icy glory.
It promises to be the biggest planetary unveiling in a quarter-century. The curtain hasn't been pulled back like this since NASA's Voyager 2 shed light on Neptune in 1989.
Now it's little Pluto's turn to shine way out on the frigid fringes of our solar system.
New Horizons has traveled 3 billion miles over 9½ years to get to this historic point. The fastest spacecraft ever launched, it carries the most powerful suite of science instruments ever sent on a scouting and reconnaissance mission of a new, unfamiliar world.
Guarantees principal scientist Alan Stern, "We're going to knock your socks off."
The size of a baby grand piano, the spacecraft will come closest to Pluto on Tuesday morning — at 7:49 a.m. EDT. That's when New Horizons is predicted to pass within 7,767 miles of Pluto. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will zoom within 17,931 miles of Charon, Pluto's jumbo moon.
For the plutophiles among us, it will be cause to celebrate, especially for those gathered at the operations center at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The lab designed and built the spacecraft for NASA, and has been managing its roundabout route through the solar system.
"What NASA's doing with New Horizons is unprecedented in our time and probably something close to the last train to Clarksville, the last picture show, for a very, very long time," says Stern, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
It is the last stop in NASA's quest to explore every planet in our solar system, starting with Venus in 1962. And in a cosmic coincidence, the Pluto visit falls on the 50th anniversary of the first-ever flyby of Mars, by Mariner 4.
Yes, we all know Pluto is no longer an official planet, merely a dwarf, but it still enjoyed full planet status when New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006. Pluto's demotion came just seven months later, a sore subject still for many.
"We're kind of running the anchor leg with Pluto to finish the relay," Stern says.
The sneak peeks of Pluto in recent weeks are getting "juicier and juicier," says Johns Hopkins project scientist Hal Weaver. "The science team is just drooling over these pictures."
This July 8, 2015 image provided by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwe …
The Hubble Space Telescope previously captured the best pictures of Pluto. If the pixelated blobs of pictures had been of Earth, though, not even the continents would have been visible.
The New Horizons team is turning "a point of light into a planet," Stern says.
An image released last week shows a copper-colored Pluto bearing, a large, bright spot in the shape of a heart.
Scientists expect image resolution to improve dramatically by Tuesday. The 7,767-mile span at closest approach is about the distance between Seattle and Sydney.
New Horizons, weighing less than 1,000 pounds including fuel, has seven instruments that will be going full force during the encounter. It's expected to collect 5,000 times as much data, for instance, as Mariner 4.
"We're going to rewrite the book," Weaver says. "This is it — this is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it."
The team gets one crack at this.
"We're trying to hit a very small box, relatively speaking," says Mark Holdridge, the encounter mission manager. "It's 60 by 90 miles, and we're going 30,000 mph, and we're trying to hit that box within a plus or minus 100 seconds."
The only planet in our solar system discovered by an American, Pluto actually is a mini solar system unto itself. Pluto — just two-thirds the size of our own moon — has big moon Charon that's just over half its size, as well as baby moons Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos. The names are associated with the underworld in which the mythological god, Pluto, reigned. New Horizons will observe each known moon and keep a lookout for more.
Scientists involved in the $700 million effort want to get a good look at Pluto and Charon, and get a handle on their surfaces and chemical composition. They also plan to measure the temperature and pressure in Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere and determine how much gas is escaping into space. Temperatures can plunge to nearly minus-400 degrees.
Bill McKinnon, a New Horizons team member from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, expects to see craters and possible volcanic remnants. A liquid ocean and a rocky core may lie beneath the icy shell.
"Anybody who thinks that when we go to Pluto, we're going to find cold, dead ice balls is in for a rude shock," McKinnon says. "I'm really hoping to see a very active and dynamic world."
Pluto has tantalized astronomers since its 1930 discovery by Clyde Tombaugh using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Some of Tombaugh's ashes are aboard New Horizons. His two children, now in their 70s, plan to be at Johns Hopkins for the encounter.
With its tilted, elongated 248-year orbit, Pluto has made it only a third of the way around the sun since its discovery. The amount of sunlight that reaches Pluto is so dim that at high noon it looks like twilight here on Earth. The massive surrounding Kuiper Belt, in fact, is called the Twilight Zone. The New Horizons team has its eyes on a few much smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, and is hoping for a mission extension as the spacecraft continues toward the solar system exit on the heels of NASA's Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.
For now, signals take 4½ hours to travel one-way between New Horizons and flight controllers in Maryland.
New Horizons' science instruments will be cranked up to collect maximum data Tuesday, leaving no time to send back data. In fact, scientists won't be absolutely certain of success until Tuesday night, 13 hours following New Horizons' closest approach, when it "phones home."
It will be Wednesday before the closest of Pluto's close-ups are available for release. And it will be well into next year — October 2016 — before all the anticipated data are transmitted to Earth.
"We're all going to have to be patient," urges deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin.
For everyone involved, this is a mission of delayed gratification.
Back to bottling my Grenache
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Pluto, reveal thyself, and Earthlings, enjoy the show.
On Tuesday, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will sweep past Pluto and present the previously unexplored world in all its icy glory.
It promises to be the biggest planetary unveiling in a quarter-century. The curtain hasn't been pulled back like this since NASA's Voyager 2 shed light on Neptune in 1989.
Now it's little Pluto's turn to shine way out on the frigid fringes of our solar system.
New Horizons has traveled 3 billion miles over 9½ years to get to this historic point. The fastest spacecraft ever launched, it carries the most powerful suite of science instruments ever sent on a scouting and reconnaissance mission of a new, unfamiliar world.
Guarantees principal scientist Alan Stern, "We're going to knock your socks off."
The size of a baby grand piano, the spacecraft will come closest to Pluto on Tuesday morning — at 7:49 a.m. EDT. That's when New Horizons is predicted to pass within 7,767 miles of Pluto. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will zoom within 17,931 miles of Charon, Pluto's jumbo moon.
For the plutophiles among us, it will be cause to celebrate, especially for those gathered at the operations center at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The lab designed and built the spacecraft for NASA, and has been managing its roundabout route through the solar system.
"What NASA's doing with New Horizons is unprecedented in our time and probably something close to the last train to Clarksville, the last picture show, for a very, very long time," says Stern, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
It is the last stop in NASA's quest to explore every planet in our solar system, starting with Venus in 1962. And in a cosmic coincidence, the Pluto visit falls on the 50th anniversary of the first-ever flyby of Mars, by Mariner 4.
Yes, we all know Pluto is no longer an official planet, merely a dwarf, but it still enjoyed full planet status when New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006. Pluto's demotion came just seven months later, a sore subject still for many.
"We're kind of running the anchor leg with Pluto to finish the relay," Stern says.
The sneak peeks of Pluto in recent weeks are getting "juicier and juicier," says Johns Hopkins project scientist Hal Weaver. "The science team is just drooling over these pictures."
This July 8, 2015 image provided by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwe …
The Hubble Space Telescope previously captured the best pictures of Pluto. If the pixelated blobs of pictures had been of Earth, though, not even the continents would have been visible.
The New Horizons team is turning "a point of light into a planet," Stern says.
An image released last week shows a copper-colored Pluto bearing, a large, bright spot in the shape of a heart.
Scientists expect image resolution to improve dramatically by Tuesday. The 7,767-mile span at closest approach is about the distance between Seattle and Sydney.
New Horizons, weighing less than 1,000 pounds including fuel, has seven instruments that will be going full force during the encounter. It's expected to collect 5,000 times as much data, for instance, as Mariner 4.
"We're going to rewrite the book," Weaver says. "This is it — this is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it."
The team gets one crack at this.
"We're trying to hit a very small box, relatively speaking," says Mark Holdridge, the encounter mission manager. "It's 60 by 90 miles, and we're going 30,000 mph, and we're trying to hit that box within a plus or minus 100 seconds."
The only planet in our solar system discovered by an American, Pluto actually is a mini solar system unto itself. Pluto — just two-thirds the size of our own moon — has big moon Charon that's just over half its size, as well as baby moons Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos. The names are associated with the underworld in which the mythological god, Pluto, reigned. New Horizons will observe each known moon and keep a lookout for more.
Scientists involved in the $700 million effort want to get a good look at Pluto and Charon, and get a handle on their surfaces and chemical composition. They also plan to measure the temperature and pressure in Pluto's nitrogen-rich atmosphere and determine how much gas is escaping into space. Temperatures can plunge to nearly minus-400 degrees.
Bill McKinnon, a New Horizons team member from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, expects to see craters and possible volcanic remnants. A liquid ocean and a rocky core may lie beneath the icy shell.
"Anybody who thinks that when we go to Pluto, we're going to find cold, dead ice balls is in for a rude shock," McKinnon says. "I'm really hoping to see a very active and dynamic world."
Pluto has tantalized astronomers since its 1930 discovery by Clyde Tombaugh using the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Some of Tombaugh's ashes are aboard New Horizons. His two children, now in their 70s, plan to be at Johns Hopkins for the encounter.
With its tilted, elongated 248-year orbit, Pluto has made it only a third of the way around the sun since its discovery. The amount of sunlight that reaches Pluto is so dim that at high noon it looks like twilight here on Earth. The massive surrounding Kuiper Belt, in fact, is called the Twilight Zone. The New Horizons team has its eyes on a few much smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, and is hoping for a mission extension as the spacecraft continues toward the solar system exit on the heels of NASA's Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.
For now, signals take 4½ hours to travel one-way between New Horizons and flight controllers in Maryland.
New Horizons' science instruments will be cranked up to collect maximum data Tuesday, leaving no time to send back data. In fact, scientists won't be absolutely certain of success until Tuesday night, 13 hours following New Horizons' closest approach, when it "phones home."
It will be Wednesday before the closest of Pluto's close-ups are available for release. And it will be well into next year — October 2016 — before all the anticipated data are transmitted to Earth.
"We're all going to have to be patient," urges deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin.
For everyone involved, this is a mission of delayed gratification.
Back to bottling my Grenache