New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
"After 9.5 years and 6 billion km, we made it to Pluto 72 seconds ahead of schedule."
Amazing!
The views of Pluto and Charon already reveal how incredibly fascinating this system is. The dichotomy of their surface colours will most definitely lead to further insight into formation processes in the Kuiper Belt.
Just such a shame that we can't land this time around. With the volume of discoveries generated by MESSENGER and Cassini, and the wealth of knowledge that New Horizons is going to generate, it's such a shame that my favourite planet, Uranus, is likely not going to be visited in my lifetime. I spent my PhD studying the mysterious outer ring system of Uranus, and I'm 100% positive that a close-up view of the entire system would blow our minds.
Somebody who solves/disrupts science communication deserves a Nobel Prize.
EDIT: Fixed typos
Most of your post is about visiting planets and exploring the solar system, but you close witha comment about disrupting science communication. What aspects of science communication are you referring to?
The fact that missions like Cassini, Kepler etc. have to fight to keep the lights on is IMHO testament to the fact that we've failed in communicating their value to society. I try to post stuff on my blog [1] to engage people in the wonders of space science and exploration: it doesn't feel effective though. Someone that figures out how to fully convey the value of missions like New Horizons to the public deserves a serious pat on the back.
[1] http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&Ne...
You can't argue with the results though; Over a thousand planets discovered with another four thousand candidates. I'm not sure why we don't have multiple Kepler-like missions running simultaneously to map out our entire section of the Milky Way.
I see a small / niche market in space tourism; Virgin Intergalactic is probably going to get on there. But it'll be limited to those that can shell out 100K for it.
There was some talk about a company a few years back that wanted to mine asteroids; I personally think that's science fiction and won't be a profitable endeavour, but, if I'm wrong, it'll unleash a new kind of corporate space race.
I think it can go very fast if there's enough money to be made. As it stands though, besides satellites, there is nothing to be had.
Of course going into space is so expensive and so few of us would make the cut as astronauts that hardly anyone realistically expects to become a space explorer, but we would like to live vicariously through other space explorers, but this isn't possible if our explorers never go anywhere. I think the reason people get so wrapped up in the story of the Mars rovers and the Rosetta/Philae mission was that those probes are the most relateable things since people walked on the Moon in the 1970s.
Really, I think we should be doing manned Moon missions regularly. People point out that there's nothing on the Moon that we want, which is sort of true (although we've learned so much since the last time we went that we should reconsider that angle) but that's a dreadfully consumerist mindset. The Moon is a (relatively) accessible destination that we could use as a proving ground for interplanetary exploration techniques. But more importantly, making regular visits or having a permanent outpost there gives people something to project their imaginations onto (including their political and technological imagination). I have a small collection of old newspapers and my favorite is one published the day after the first Moon landing with the simple headline 'Men on Moon'. Reading it still gives me a shiver of excitement, followed by disappointment that we abandoned Moon exploration by the mid 1970s.
One often-forgotten detail of the Moon landing was that at the time there was a Russian observer spacecraft orbiting the Moon, and it dropped down to within 10 miles of the surface at the time of the landing (presumably to observe what the Americans were up to). I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Charlie Rose last week and he was joking that his favorite daydream is meeting the Chinese President at a conference and persuading him to leak a fake memo saying China aims to land a man on Mars, which would galvanize the American body politic back into serious investment in space. Sad but true.
You can be the best speaker in the world, but you'll still only end up communicating to a small sliver of the average people.
I think changing the cultural attitudes towards science will do far more good in the long run, but it's very difficult. Ultimately, I think science isn't loved because it's slow, difficult, and filled with probablistic truth that will likely change in a few years.
This compares poorly to the easily marketable absolute truths that fill most people's days. The worst of science reporting happens when reporters try to make science fit into this mold.
If you have a passion about anything at all, good for you. Preaching its importance to the world at large means very little to those who don't share your interest. You might introduce a few new people to a topic which they will then grow into themselves, but the majority of your words will fall of deaf ears.
Fanatics of science are especially prone to this problem, because of this idea that it's all based on facts and improving life, and so surely every single damn person on the planet HAS TO CARE.
Not to mention that the real science buffs typically can't even begin to understand that _not everyone thinks the way they do_. Brainy people tend to think everyone else alive must be as curious and obsessed with details about every aspect of life. You know what, some people are very happy living without daily intellectual bombardment.
My "preference" for Uranus simply comes from the hours and hours I've spent trying to model dynamic processes in the system. It's a truly fascinating and in some sense "rapidly" evolving system. I spent my time looking at the tiny moon Mab [1] and I could spend hours telling you about how fascinating it is. If you consider how many other moons and rings there are in the system, it's just a shame to think I might not live long enought to see the undoubtedly incredible discoveries that an orbiter would lead to.
If it's infeasible to slow down to get into orbit or land on Pluto, what about the feasibility of designing a probe to impact Pluto at XX km/sec and survive well enough to send back data.
Like, fire a (metaphorical) bullet full of scientific instruments directly into the surface of the planet.
Is it simply that we have no way to build something that could both survive such an impact and be complex enough to do anything useful afterwards? Or might it create too much destruction on Pluto's surface? Or some combination of those?
Edit:
I mean, it worked when we went to the Moon: http://gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Georges-M%C3...
Edit 2:
Not literally a bullet. I'm aware of the speed difference between NH and a bullet. ;-)
There's also a sense that if you're going to spend tons of money to send a once-in-a-generation probe to an outer planet, it has to work.
The probe weighs 480 kilograms, so it's kinetic energy is approximately 63.2 Gigajoules. For reference, this is like 15 tonnes of TNT released on impact. Hard to make something that survives those kind of conditions.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0130080...
The constraint there, though, might be designing equipment that is both very low mass and also capable of talking back to either Earth or the rest of NH as it zips away.
More seriously, there's a dust counter on the probe whose entire job is to be hit with stuff. But it's much tinier than a sand grain.
[1] http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/about/DSNComplexes/70meter/
Example: Philae communicated with Earth via Rosetta.
source: I've played Kerbal Space Program. If you speak maths (I don't), you could probably do them; the calculations are relatively simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v.
Delta-v is literally Physics 101
Landing on Mars is hard, but feasible. Because it has a thick atmosphere to help with the braking
Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc)
Of course, bodies with little atmosphere also have a small gravity, so that makes things easier as well (like landing on the Moon)
Please elaborate. What is dangerous about a braking burn? Sure, it's harder (because you need to carry that fuel), but not impossible in principle.
> Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc)
I'm sorry, when do rockets not work?
Same arguments apply to Saturn, but "we" managed to get Cassini in orbit. It's a matter of scale, not principle.
New Horizons got to Jupiter after ONE year
see what happened with philae, they got two redundant system to land and both failed.
if the scan reveal pluto to have an usable atmosphere, it will be much much easier to land
however, if you look at the trajectory they used it's an orthogonal encounter [1]
that means the speed they have relative one another is quite much more than when you approach calmly from behind using a hoffman transfer or the like - however if you go that route, instead of waiting 10 years you have to wait a load more, probably more like hundreds (exactly what they did with phila, they approached from the closest orbit possible to minimize the correction burn needed [2])
and let us not forget that having anything in space surviving for soo long is a challenge by itself, as having equipment on earth funded for so long to be maintained operational - remember this story about the other spacecraft that was sent to a comet flyby and was out of gas due leaks on its way back? [3] they had to work a great deal just to rebuild the communication equipement in time
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/New_Hori... [2] http://i.imgur.com/TUkKuhf.gif [3] http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/07/attempt-to-retrieve-nas...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-way-to-reach...
The big problem with ballistic capture is that it doesn't guarantee a more optimal solution. Transfers can take a lot longer, and in theory even require more fuel. So it's very much a case of having to perform mission analysis on a case-by-case basis.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting prospect to send unmanned missions to Mars carrying habitat elements, before a manned mission, since they can be sent well in advance. I analyzed the prospect of potentially using a cycler [3] for this in my thesis.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8856
[2] http://repository.tudelft.nl/view/ir/uuid%3Ae8c99c80-a25d-4c...
[3] http://courses.ae.utexas.edu/ase333t/past_projects/04spring/...
This means that if that first bounce upon impact would result in even 10% of the initial velocity, it will literally bounce out of the system and back towards the sun.
That's actually harder to do.
To insert in orbit, you can still have some residual speed, you don't have to slow all the way down.
To land on the surface and survive, you would have to brake even harder. Anything near orbital speed would be a non-survivable impact, even for hardened electronics. Not to mention interactions with the atmosphere on the way down.
And the note about the probe also carrying the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh was touching.
In the near future launch prices are going to be much lower, which changes the landscape in exploration and exploitation of space completely. That means that you can get more missions for fewer dollars. It means you can be more adventurous and innovative (since the cost of failure is lower and the time to recover is shorter). Which includes things like making increasing use of advanced propulsion (ion engines, plasma propulsion, etc.) which would enable things like a Neptune orbiter or what-have-you.
As to communications, almost certainly there will be a change to laser based communications over long distances. The technology is maturing and once we have the ability to put more infrastructure off-Earth (orbit, etc.) then you can replace things like the DSN with laser based communication hubs in orbit or at L2 or L4/L5 or wherever. They'd take the form of essentially space telescopes with special instrumentation for sending and receiving laser comms. That would make it possible to send and receive at a much higher rate across the entire solar system.
"Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the Solar System's 'Third Zone.' Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906 - 1997)."
A fitting tribute.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh
[2] http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2015_28/1109391/150706...
Although our own solar system is believed to support no other life than on Earth, other stars in the galaxy may have hundreds of thousands of habitable worlds. Races on these worlds may have been able to utilize the tremendous amounts of power required to bridge the space between the stars..." Tombaugh stated that he had observed celestial phenomena which he could not explain, but had seen none personally since 1951 or 1952. "These things, which do appear to be directed, are unlike any other phenomena I ever observed. Their apparent lack of obedience to the ordinary laws of celestial motion gives credence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh#Interest_in_UFO...
In August 1992, JPL scientist Robert Staehle called Tombaugh, requesting permission to visit his planet. "I told him he was welcome to it," Tombaugh later remembered, "though he's got to go one long, cold trip." The call eventually led to the launch of the New Horizons space probe to Pluto in 2006.
There is one big exception, of course: the Soviet Union was the first to have a spacecraft visit Earth, with Spunink.
This category is completely arbitrary, especially given that Pluto is now considered a minor planet. Still, it's an achievement of note.
Mercury - 1974, Mariner 10
Venus --- 1962, Mariner 2
Earth --- 1957, Sputnik 1
Mars* --- 1965, Mariner 4
Jupiter - 1973, Pioneer 10
Saturn -- 1979, Pioneer 11
Uranus -- 1986, Voyager 2
Neptune - 1989, Voyager 2
Pluto --- 2015, New Horizons
edit: formatting
I really hope we someday get to the point where no one really cares what "country" achieved the next space exploration milestone.
edit: To be fair, I am really heartened when I see how international the teams that do work in the space station generally are. We've come a long way.
Sears is an example of how the introduction of internal competition does not lead to useful innovation - http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inter...
(It may lead to increased levels of backstabbing, but that's hardly innovative.)
Humans are a social species, so also have an innate nature to cooperate.
Also, the concept of 'country' is a rather recent invention. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state#History_and_origi... for some context. It's certainly possible that kohanz's "hope [that] we someday get to the point where no one really cares what "country" achieved the next space exploration milestone" can be true yet still have competitiveness.
Perhaps space exploration of 100 years from now will be lead by volunteer teams based on, their WoW clan membership. While preposterous, the teams could still be competitive even if they are not organized by nations.
I certainly agree that competition can be wasteful, but proxy conflict can be healthy, eg the space race as proxy competition for the Cold War which almost nobody wanted to see played out as an actual military conflict. Private competition will undoubtedly exist the future (and is already coming into being today) but the capital and infrastructural requirements of space exploration are such that only nation states can command the resources for large-scale projects at present. You might be interested in this comparison of how Apple, the world's most valuabel company, stacks up against actual countries, which suggests it could be considered in the same league as Azerbaijan, Belarus, or perhaps Norway, depending on what metric you use - impressive, but still small potatoes in the overall scheme of things: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/28/2103622/if-apple-were-...
But as to the issue, I recently listened to a lecture about the process of deciding what the European nations would be after the First World War. The different nations had wildly different ideas of how to decide what was their national territory and people. The people of Alsace speak German, but the French said (and I paraphrase) "look at their love of wine and joie de vivre - they are French, but were forced to speak German".
Or of a farmer in central Europe, when asked "what are you?" answered "farmer", and then "where are you from?" brought the name of the local town. When asked more insistently, he said "Catholic". The concept of nation made no sense to him.
The concept of nationhood is quite complicated. Is Scotland a nation? India during the British Empire? It's more complicated than I want to get into. But in the context of the tgcordell comment, which tries to connect species imperatives with national competition, I mean to point out that the concept of 'nation' is too new to really have an evolutionary component. (And if it does, it's built on cooperation.)
I don't deny that proxy conflict can be healthy, though proxy conflict in Korea wasn't all that healthy for those involved. Is it possible to determine the healthy conflict beforehand, or is it something that's mostly done after the fact?
Yes.
I agree with your general points, but while many people would certainly have been unaware of or indifferent to a national concept I think people in cities on major trade routes or in power centers like Rome would certainly have been aware of other places and would have been broadly aware of their own significance (although this awareness was doubtless concentrated among a social, military and business elite).
Just want to point out the fallacy in your logic.
We're partway there. As you say, there is cooperation on the Space Station. Cooperation between the various space agencies on missions from telescopes to probes is commonplace. Look at Cassini: a NASA probe with a ESA lander. The Curiosity rover has a Russian instrument on it.
But we haven't reached the point yet where nationalism is no longer a part of the drive behind space exploration or other 'big-science' projects. I see competition for scientific glory as a healthy and productive form of competition, so I don't think we should completely shy away from it. It's akin to rival schools competing for academic glory - a kind of tribalism that results in achievements which benefit all.
Would we have ever gotten to the Moon at all if it weren't for the competition between the USA and the USSR?
"Among the other results, probes of the series became the first man-made devices
to enter the atmosphere of another planet (Venera 4 on October 18, 1967), to
make a soft landing on another planet (Venera 7 on December 15, 1970), to
return images from the planetary surface (Venera 9 on June 8, 1975), and to
perform high-resolution radar mapping studies of Venus (Venera 15 on June 2,
1983). The entire series could be considered highly successful."* One of the two cameras on Venera 9 failed to function because the lens cap didn't come off properly.
* Ditto for Venera 10.
* Venera 11 broke the trend by having lens caps fail to come off of BOTH cameras.
* Venera 12... same thing.
* Venera 13, ironically, broke the curse. The lens caps came off properly, and both cameras functioned.
* Venera 14 had both cameras function as well. However, it had a unique new problem: the lens cap landed directly under the lander's soil probe, and it ended up measuring the compressibility of the lens cap.
I never imagined that now we'd be getting the level of detail seen in these photos of Pluto (level of detail akin to a Moon shot), which until now, only existed in my mind from various artistic impressions. I can only imagine how the folks on the New Horizons team feel after seeing the results of their work after so much time and effort.
Isaac Asimov's science essay collections had a profound effect on me. I learned physics years ahead of when I would have in school by reading these essays and learning how to do calculations involving kinetic energy, mass, acceleration, etc. Even more important, those essays helped me learn how to think like a scientist. Asimov's secular humanist world view also influenced my own world view greatly. I met him several times at various SF conventions and I miss him.
When I opened this article, my jaw dropped. I never in my life expected to see Pluto in this level of detail. I always imagined it would be just a cold ball of rock. This is absolutely amazing.
And there's this still: Images set to be released on Wednesday will be more than 10 times the resolution of those already published.
Image:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ32XAEVAAAp_8T.png:large
Tweet:
https://twitter.com/NASANewHorizons/status/62092320062141235...
Also when they release the pic on Twitter in crappy form before they release it in uncompressed form.
I hear so many complaints about Twitter recompressing pics I figured that would happen here.
Or Larry Soderblom on Triton. Try to dig up the full "Encounter with Neptune". . . classic. . . first ten minutes - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8zzlq_encounter-with-neptu...
Pluto has an atmosphere. It snows on Pluto and the snow sublimates back into the atmosphere.
"Winter is coming."
Google for "pluto atmosphere collapse" and set the date range to before Aug 2013.
Still, I am pleasantly surprised by the excitement this mission is garnering.
(They are closer, so probably the New Horizons mission is more expensive.)
Everyone has earned the right to chant the name of whatever country they feel like.
We just need to start setting up bases!
ALL YOUR PLUTO BELONG TO US!!!
There's an interesting BBC documentary series on the planets, called The Planets, that has an episode covering the Voyager probes. They had to do some quick redesigns on them after Pioneer 10 and 11 visited the outer planets and found fun stuff like radiation and unexpected rings. They said that if they hadn't had the earlier probes, Voyager would have been fried when it got to the system.
You might be dead by the time that actually happens, so better to be killed by sorrow of only getting fly-by data than the agony of having only what Hubble and its successors can resolve.
Therefore, the Pu-238 used in RTGs is likely produced through another process, neutron capture in Np-237. Np-237 is produced in very small amounts in a uranium reactor, but as it's the only Neptunium isotope produced in any significant quantity, there's no need to do an isotope separation on it. It can be chemically separated from the other elements in the spent fuel, which is much easier, although certainly still not easy.
In any case, with the end of the Cold War there are indeed fewer facilities willing & able to produce Pu-238 in kilogram quantities. In the US, spent fuel from commercial reactors currently cannot be re-processed at all, due to proliferation concerns.
I'm guessing there isn't a robotic arm holding up a test card in front of the camera :-)
[1] http://www.responsivespace.com/Papers/RS7/SESSIONS/Session%2...
The colors you observe are just models of the different frequencies which our brain has evolved into to label as "red", "violet", or "#782". :)
A much less/more evolved brain (be it alien or terrestrial) will observer it much differently.
Sorry to bring biology into this :)
Check outworlder's post for the xkcd link, you petty graphic artists!
Imagine writing a piece of code see the test results only 9.5 years after !
Is one of those Hydras supposed to be something else?
[1] http://www.bis-space.com/2015/07/13/14875/inside-new-horizon...
[2] http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-payload-overview.pdf
Anyway: wow! The quality of this preview is already amazing. Waiting for the high res version :)
However, there may be other factors:
1. As you note, the mass of the Earth-Moon system is much greater than the mass of the Pluto-Charon system.
2. In the Earth-Moon system, the moon is the outer protector. In the Pluto system, there are five smaller protectors and Pluto is the protected.
3. The inner solar system is a small, dense region closer to the gravity of the sun and gas giants. Objects thrown in our direction are likely to stick around. In contrast, the Kuiper Belt isn't very dense and objects thrown in that direction not only have more places to go, but may be on their way out of the solar system or into extended hyperbolic orbits.
3. KBOs aren't very dense, so even impacts which occur may not create massive craters.
Could we conceivably create a formula that takes into account all of humanity's previous milestones of technological breakthrough's and the distances they have achieved for us.. and project where we could be 100, 500, 1000 yrs from now?
Perhaps there is a vague velocity pattern we can derive from a plethora of historic data?
*apologies for not being very articulate today..im still in awe!
Although companies like Virgin Intergalactic and SpaceX are working hard on making it more affordable, thanks to some advancements. Still though, practically speaking, getting anything into orbit is hard enough.
We'll probably see a manned Mars mission in our lifetime, but for anything beyond that you'll probably have to read science fiction.
As the saying goes, "low Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system".
Also, it's so incredible that the New Horizon's team has managed to get to something so small and far away!
Can we please stop comparing a success chant with "aggressive acts against other countries"?
Unnecessary nationalism, sure. Jingoism is hyperbole.
Context was:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884196
:)
So it will just do a very short flyby, then spend the next year or two sending the data back to Earth. After that it's not decided, but probably some Kuiper belt object like you suggest.
For one thing, it assumes that only a small fraction of the image sensor's surface is actually capable of detecting light, which would make it very inefficient. Typical consumer digital cameras can capture over 30% of the incoming energy, and presumably New Horizons' camera can do better, being specifically designed for a low-light environment.
More importantly, no atmospheric "diffusion" is required to spread out the incoming light, because it's occurring anyway through diffraction at the camera's aperture. The angular resolution of the LORRI camera is specified as about 1 arcsecond, which is comparable to the atmospheric seeing conditions on a relatively clear night on Earth.
This is exactly the same effect. There are probably not any stars of high enough magnitude to be visible on the same exposure with such a bright object. In fact, there are definitely not: otherwise, we would see them on the image.
For more proof, check out some earlier navigation images taken by New Horizons as it approached pluto, greatly overexposing Pluto and Charon in order to see the stars around them: https://twitter.com/NewHorizonsBot/status/615264675975065600
It's difficult to imagine Pluto, being so far out, being "bright," but remember that light intensity falls off at an inverse square rate with distance. New Horizons being so close to pluto, it's actually an extremely bright object relative to the stars behind it.
In fact, NASA did a fun twitter experiment where they gave people the exact time at their location on Earth when it would appear as bright as noon on Pluto. You can see many resulting images here, illustrating how bright the Pluto surface might look were you standing on it: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23plutotime
See how many stars you see near pictures of the moon: https://www.google.com/search?q=moon&tbm=isch
Most photos from space don't capture stars unless they're trying to, because whatever object they're photographing is sufficiently bright to blow out any stars.
I'd like to find more detailed information about the hardware and software on this thing. It's amazing that it was launched back in 2006. My 2006 Mac Pro is basically useless now....
You also have to account for the dilation caused by the force of launch itself.
But then you have to subtract the dilation of Earth.
> There would also be a correction due to it being farther out of the Sun's gravity well
Because it is in free-fall relative to the Sun there is no Solar gravitational dilation.
t' = t * (1-v^2/c^2)^(1/2)
t' = 9.5 * (1-16000^2/299792458^2)^(1/2)
t' = 9.5 * 0.99999999857...
(t-t') years = 426.7 milliseconds
gam = 0.9999999985758079
with this, earth sees any time interval on new horizons t' to be
\detla t' = \delta t / gam
longer than the time t on earth. Integrating both sides above over time, keeping velocity constant, we get
t' = t/ gam = 9.5 yr / 0.9999999985758079 = 9.500000013529824 yr
this gives an difference between our observed "new horizons time" and out local time of
t' - t = t/gam - t = (1/gam - 1) t = 0.4 s
we disagree by about a factor of 45000.