The new Horizons spacecraft was launched in 2006 for a trip to Pluto and beyond. Unfortunately for this mission there is a little controversy about Pluto as you probably know. Pluto, to put a long story short, has been deemed a dwarf planet by the IAU and this doesn’t really suit the image that NASA would like to give about this mission. As you can imagine, telling the world that you are visiting a rock that is so far away that even Hubble can’t take a decent picture of it and that it costs about $700 million would not go down that well.
Luckily, for the mission, there are a lot more interesting things that New Horizons will be looking at. Take the Kuiper belt for instance. The Kuiper Belt is its secondary mission which is to explore whatever it can after dealing with Pluto.
After its launch in January 2006 the Horizons spacecraft flew by Jupiter in February 2007 and is aiming to reach Pluto for its closest approach at July 14, 2015. At the moment the spacecraft is at the halfway point. Normally we are used to times to planets and moons being a lot less which is normally around a year or two, but this nine-year voyage just goes to show how big the solar system really is.
New Horizons Launch Vehicle
Pluto is a body type that hasn’t been explored in the solar system. We have explored the terrestrial planets in one way or another and we have prodded a finger at the gas giants but we have come nowhere near the bodies in the Kuiper belt. Considering that we thought Titan, Enceladus and Europa were just big lumps of ice and each one now has the possibility of some sort of life, who’s to know what we may find in the region of Pluto?
Charon will also be explored. It is Pluto’s largest moon being half the size of Pluto. Both Pluto and Charon form a binary planet where the gravitational balance point is halfway between the two. Binary planet and binary stars are thought to be very common in the universe but we have not explored a binary system yet. The new Horizons mission may throw up some surprises in this area.
Pluto and its Moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra
The new Horizons mission will only be able to make a flyby. After travelling all the way it sounds a bit odd that the spacecraft will not be able to go into orbit and stay there for awhile sending us back happy snaps of the surface of Pluto. To get to Pluto Horizons is travelling at 30,000 mph and there is no practical or cost efficient way to store enough fuel to slow the spacecraft down again and to allow it to go into orbit. The flyby mission is a compromise and has been planned to send back many images and lots of other information about Pluto and its moons as well as an opportunity to study the Kuiper belt which if it had gone into orbit would not be an option.
New Horizon Intruments
To obtain as much information as they can the spacecraft has seven instruments on board to find out interesting information for NASA and the planetary science community.
- Ralph. This will give us some really nice pictures of the surface of Pluto and its composition. It is color and high resolution.
- LEISA will measure the methane frost, water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen distribution over the surface using an infrared camera.
- Alice is an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer which will look at the atmospheres composition by separating light into its different wavelengths and sending us the results.
- REX stands for radio experiment which is probably the most important piece of kit on the new Horizons spacecraft. It is a special printed circuit board containing electronics that are wired up to the radio telecommunications system. All communications with the spacecraft will be through this circuit board including the transmission of data back to Earth so it is one of the things that just must work.
- LORRI is an abbreviation, long range reconnaissance imager, which is a telescope that focuses light onto a charge coupled device (CCD), a CCD is just another way of capturing light. At the time of closest approach to Pluto LORRI will give football field sized resolution pictures of the surface.
- PEPSSI, the Pluto energetic particle spectrometer science investigation will search for neutral atoms that escape Pluto’s atmosphere and interact with the solar wind.
- The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (SDC) will measure the amount and sizes of dust particles along the spacecraft’s complete trajectory. These are particles from comets and Kuiper belt objects colliding with one another. You wouldn’t be surprised from the title that students at the University of Colorado in Boulder built this.
This is going to be a really great mission to watch but unfortunately it needs a lot more flight time before it reaches Pluto. I think this mission will be very interesting, just like Cassini, touring the Kuiper Belt looking at new objects.
It’s better to have controversy and debate than for people to blindly accept the controversial IAU dictate. Only four percent of the IAU voted on the controversial demotion, and most are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately opposed in a formal petition by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. One reason the IAU definition makes no sense is it says dwarf planets are not planets at all! That is like saying a grizzly bear is not a bear, and it is inconsistent with the use of the term “dwarf” in astronomy, where dwarf stars are still stars, and dwarf galaxies are still galaxies. Also, the IAU definition classifies objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were in Pluto’s orbit, according to the IAU definition, it would not be a planet either. A definition that takes the same object and makes it a planet in one location and not a planet in another is essentially useless. Pluto is a planet because it is spherical, meaning it is large enough to be pulled into a round shape by its own gravity–a state known as hydrostatic equilibrium and characteristic of planets, not of shapeless asteroids held together by chemical bonds. These reasons are why many astronomers, lay people, and educators are either ignoring the demotion entirely or working to get it overturned.
My own personal view is that Pluto is Pluto. It’s still there whatever we call it and will still look the same to astronomers whatever the name.
The trouble with calling Pluto a planet is that you are going to have a lot of other planets once the Kuiper belt has been explored as there will be a lot of circular rocks found, probably bigger than Pluto.
I think the whole problem with names of objects in the solar system is that there is not an authoritative body that everybody will listen to.
So far, only one spherical Kuiper Belt Object larger than Pluto has been found. However, even if there are many more, why is it a problem to have a large number of planets? No one objects to there being billions of stars or to Jupiter having 63 moons. Keeping the number arbitrarily low has no scientific basis. Something can be both a Kuiper Belt Object and a planet if it is located in the Kuiper Belt but is also large enough to be rounded by its own gravity. In fact, it was Alan Stern who first coined the term dwarf planet, but he never meant for it to mean not a planet at all. Instead, he intended for it to indicate a third class of planets in addition to terrestrials and jovians–objects that are planets because they are large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium but of the dwarf subcategory because they do not gravitationally dominate their orbits.
I suppose you could call all the objects in the Kuiper Belt above a certain size planets but this would be a little bit of a headache to astronomers, teachers, people that make websites (me), children and I would expect most people once they realise the enormity of the situation.
Planets to me are interesting places with the possibility of life although saying that some of the larger moons (Titan recently) look good for life. It just wouldn’t feel right to have hundreds of thousands of planets circling around the Sun.
It’s all a bit of a mess really and I hope someone comes up with a solution soon. In a way it’s like trying to get Americans and English to say tomato in the same way. I’m English and say “mar” in the middle whereas Americans say it with “may” in the middle. Planet or dwarf planet?? I’m just glad we haven’t got a planet called tomato which may be the case if every object above the size of Pluto was called a planet taking into account the asteroid belt the Oort cloud and the Kuiper Belt.
ah-how we fear the unknown!
This, too, should be canceled now that Pluto is no longer a planet.
With inner-city Welfare mothers no longer able to maintain their Netflix accounts, what business have we with spending thousands of dollars on Pluto?