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Pluto Mission

The New Horizons spacecraft will conduct a flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. It will gather close-up images and scientific data on Pluto's surface, atmosphere, and moons. No other mission has visited Pluto or other icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune's orbit.

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51 views1 page

Pluto Mission

The New Horizons spacecraft will conduct a flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. It will gather close-up images and scientific data on Pluto's surface, atmosphere, and moons. No other mission has visited Pluto or other icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune's orbit.

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Ante Mitar
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© © All Rights Reserved
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IN FOCUS NEWS

TH E FLY-BY

THE PATH TO PLUTO


When it began its journey, New Horizons was the fastest
spacecraft ever launched.

Sun

Saturn
orbit

Earth

Uranus
orbit

Neptune
orbit

Up to and including 12 JULY


New Horizons will map the
surface and study the
atmosphere, looking for
clouds and haze on Pluto, as
well as rings and moons
beyond the five known
(Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos
and Hydra).

Pluto
orbit

Jupiter
JANUARY 2006
Launch at Cape
Canaveral.

24

FEBRUARY 2007
Slingshot boost from
Jupiter's gravity.

200714
Hibernation.

DECEMBER 2014
New Horizons
awakens.

JULY 2015
Fly-by of Pluto and
its moon Charon.

14 JULY
New Horizons will remain radio silent for
much of the day so that it can concentrate
on gathering data at Pluto and Charon. It
will collect colour Images of Pluto at a
resolution of 0.5 kilometres per pixel, and
black-and-white ones (in a narrow band
across the dwarf planets centre) at
resolutions as high as 100 metres per pixel.

15 JULY
Close-up images of Pluto and Charon, along with
scientific data, will start to be sent to Earth over a
26-month period. New Horizons transmission rate is
limited by its communications time with NASA's Deep
Space Network and the sheer quantity of data that it
will collect during the intense, close encounter. The
highest-resolution images of Pluto that will be available
from the encounter will be transmitted on 15 July, with
those for Charon following the day after.

14 JULY

Nix
7:50 a.m.
Eastern Daylight Time
Closest approach to
Pluto, at 12,500
kilometres. Images
taken in both visible
and near-infrared
wavelengths.

HOURS OF PLUTO

13 JULY
Limited initial observations will
be sent back to Earth in case
the spacecraft does not survive
the encounter.

8:04 a.m.
Closest approach to
Charon, at 28,800
kilometres. Because this is
more than twice the
distance of the closest
approach to Pluto, the best
pictures of Charon will be
roughly twice as coarse as
those of Pluto.

10:18 a.m.
Passes through Charons
shadow, allowing it to
search for an atmosphere
on Charon.

8:51 a.m.
Passes through
Plutos shadow,
allowing it to probe
Plutos atmosphere.

9:02 p.m.
Mission team on
Earth should receive a
preprogrammed
phone home signal
which, if all went well,
will indicate the
spacecraft survived
the encounter.

New Horizons
spacecraft

SPEEDING PAST AN ICE WORLD AT THE


FRINGES OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

BY ALE X A N DRA W I TZ E
D ESIG N BY JA S I E K KRZ Y S Z TO F I A K

TH E MOONS

On 14 July, after a journey of nine and a half years and some


5 billion kilometres, NASAs New Horizons spacecraft will visit the
frigid frontier of the Solar System: Pluto. It will be a fast and
furious meeting the spacecraft will whiz past at nearly 50,000
kilometres per hour, collecting photographs and scientific data
on Plutos surface, atmosphere and environment during the
24-hour event. No mission has ever visited Pluto or any of the
other ice worlds that make up the Kuiper belt, the swarm of small
and frosty bodies that orbit mostly beyond Neptune. With its
huge moon Charon, Pluto also constitutes the Solar System's
only known binary system.

FORMATION
Early in the Solar Systems history, a proto-Charon probably walloped into a proto-Pluto,
sending debris cascading out into space. Much of that may have condensed to form
Plutos four smaller moons.

Pluto

Styx

Proto-Pluto
Charon
BINARY SYSTEM
Pluto and Charon are locked in an intricate orbital
dance. Because Charon is so large relative to Pluto
at one-eighth its mass the two actually orbit a
mutual centre of gravity that is located in space. They
also both rotate on their axes once every 6.4 Earth
days. Analyses of the shapes of Pluto and Charon
could reveal whether one or both of them ever
harboured an underground ocean, kept liquid by
subterranean heat.

THE DWA R F P L A N ET
SURFACE
Pluto is covered with several types of ice,
including methane, nitrogen and carbon
monoxide. Its reddish surface is one of the
most strongly mottled in the Solar System,
and New Horizons should reveal the
identities of these light and dark patches.
Its closest analogue in the Solar System
may be Neptunes icy moon Triton, which
is thought to have been captured from the
Kuiper belt.
ATMOSPHERE
Pluto has a thin atmosphere generated by
ices sublimating from its surface. Since its
discovery in 1988, the atmosphere has
mysteriously expanded even though
Pluto is getting farther from the Sun.

THE SMALLER MOONS


Nix and Hydra tumble chaotically on their axes, but
Nix, Styx and Hydra are locked in an orbital
resonance that has them travelling around Pluto in
synchrony. Kerberos is surprisingly dark in colour,
possibly reflecting a piece of the original impactor
that formed the PlutoCharon system. Of the small
known moons, New Horizons will get the best view of
Nix. It may also discover more moons, or dust rings,
somewhere in the system.

Ocean?
Charon
Charon
Rocky core?

Pluto
Styx Kerberos Nix Hydra

Pluto
Kerberos

NATURE.COM

Visit www.nature.com/pluto
for more on Pluto.
1 4 0 | N AT U R E | V O L 5 2 3 | 9 J U LY 2 0 1 5

Icy surface
and mantle

Hydra

2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

Earth's Moon
9 J U LY 2 0 1 5 | V O L 5 2 3 | N AT U R E | 1 4 1

PLUTO/ARTWORKS/TRAJECTORIES: NASA/JHU APL/SWRI, MOON DATA: NASA/ESA/M. SHOWALTER (SETI INSTITUTE)

Proto-Charon

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