From 2.9 billion miles away, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft let its handlers know on Saturday that it has awakened from hibernation and is ready for the climax of its nine-year trip to Pluto.
The first signals were received at the mission's control center at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland via a giant radio antenna in Australia just before 9:30 p.m. ET, nearly four and a half hours after it was sent by the piano-sized probe. It takes that long for signals to travel between there and here at the speed of light.
Later readings confirmed that New Horizons was fully awake.
"This is a watershed event that signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system, and the beginning of the mission's primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015," Southwest Research Institute planetary scientist Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the $728 million New Horizons mission, said in a NASA statement.
New Horizons has been spending about two-thirds of the time since its launch in 2006 in hibernation, to save on electronic wear and tear as well as operational costs. Every few months, the spacecraft's systems have been roused to wakefulness for a checkup, or for photo ops such as its Jupiter flyby in 2007.
The probe also has been sending weekly blips known as "green beacons" — to let the mission team know it's not dead, but only sleeping.
The instructions for the wakeup call were transmitted to the spacecraft during a checkup in August, and the signal sent on Saturday confirmed that the instructions were executed earlier in the day. To celebrate the occasion, the New Horizons team arranged for English tenor Russell Watson to record a special rendition of the Star Trek anthem "Where My Heart Will Take Me" as a wakeup song.
From now on, New Horizons will remain awake continuously through its Bastille Day flyby of Pluto and its moons next July 14. After a few weeks of preparation, the probe's instruments will start making long-range observations on Jan. 15.
The spacecraft is currently about 162 million miles away from Pluto, but as that distance shrinks, the observations will get better and better. By next May, New Horizons' images of Pluto should be sharper than the best pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. And in July, the probe may catch sight of the clouds and ice volcanoes that scientists suspect may exist on the dwarf planet.
New Horizons will capture pictures of Pluto and its five known moons, but there may be surprises as well — still more moons, perhaps, or icy rings around Pluto. So many readings are expected to pile up that New Horizons will have to store the data in its memory and transmit it for more than a year after the encounter.
After Pluto, New Horizons' team is planning to send the probe past another icy object in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of cosmic material that lies beyond Neptune's orbit, in late 2018 or 2019.
"New Horizons is on a journey to a new class of planets we've never seen, in a place we've never been before," NASA quoted New Horizons' project scientist, Hal Weaver of the Applied Physics Laboratory, as saying. "For decades we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it's really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them."
The probe's computer eventually will be reprogrammed to carry digital "selfies to the stars," courtesy of the One Earth New Horizons Message project.
Pluto has 5 moons? Maybe more? I have got to keep up with the space news better.
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Yeah there's Charon of course, then a few small comet-sized objects that were captured. Personally I'm looking forward to getting high-res images of the surface more than anything. Dibs on naming the first Plutonian mountain, "Mount Otterpop"
There is some confusion as to whether Charon counts as a moon or as a companion dwarf planet. Since the common centre of mass is outside of Pluto (IIRC) then I think it's a companion. Then you have Nix, Hydra and a jumble of letters and numbers for the last one (or two).
Baltar: "I don't want to miss a moment of the last Battlestar's destruction!"
Centurion: "Sir, I really think you should look at the other Battlestar."
Baltar: "What are you babbling about other...it's impossible!"
Centurion: "No. It is a Battlestar."
Corrax Entry 7:17: So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again.
Yeah if you want to be technical, the barycenter is about 20 thousand miles over the surface of Pluto...while most moons in the solar system have the barycenter with their planet inside the planet itself. Earth / Luna would have been considered a dual-planet system if our barycenter weren't about a thousand miles underneath the surface of the Earth.
Borgholio wrote:Yeah if you want to be technical, the barycenter is about 20 thousand miles over the surface of Pluto...while most moons in the solar system have the barycenter with their planet inside the planet itself. Earth / Luna would have been considered a dual-planet system if our barycenter weren't about a thousand miles underneath the surface of the Earth.
If I want to be technical...remember we're on SDN mate
Seriously though, New Horizons should give us some awesome data to work with, maybe settle the issue once and for all. Or until another wandering lump of ice gets captured as a 5th/6th/whatever moon.
Baltar: "I don't want to miss a moment of the last Battlestar's destruction!"
Centurion: "Sir, I really think you should look at the other Battlestar."
Baltar: "What are you babbling about other...it's impossible!"
Centurion: "No. It is a Battlestar."
Corrax Entry 7:17: So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again.
If I want to be technical...remember we're on SDN mate
Well I didn't know if we wanted to dive right into the numbers or stick with, "This is so cool!" for awhile longer.
Seriously though, New Horizons should give us some awesome data to work with
I'm also anxious to see what the probe finds beyond Pluto. The Kuiper belt is still very mysterious and being able to photograph it would be very helpful to understanding exactly what's going on out there.
There's enough legitimately real and awesome stuff out in space without bringing in science-fiction of questionable awesomeness into it.
The Kuiper Belt will be awesome to see first hand. I swear the explanations of it were were given in uni changed three times in three years. Still not as funny as what happened when Kepler was launched. One week we had a lecture of solar system formation, then Kepler starts up, and the next day it's "right, forget what I said last week, this is the new model."
Baltar: "I don't want to miss a moment of the last Battlestar's destruction!"
Centurion: "Sir, I really think you should look at the other Battlestar."
Baltar: "What are you babbling about other...it's impossible!"
Centurion: "No. It is a Battlestar."
Corrax Entry 7:17: So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again.
Uh ... your thread title is ... well ... wrong. New Horizons has successfully awakened from hibernation for the last time. It won't actually arrive at Pluto until halfway through next year.
Baltar: "I don't want to miss a moment of the last Battlestar's destruction!"
Centurion: "Sir, I really think you should look at the other Battlestar."
Baltar: "What are you babbling about other...it's impossible!"
Centurion: "No. It is a Battlestar."
Corrax Entry 7:17: So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again.
Looking forward to the images of Pluto and Charon's surface. Would love to get a better idea of what it would be like to actually be on their surfaces.
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Am I the only one who is excited we'll actually have an honest-to-God picture of our ninth planet ( International Astronomical Union) instead of computer generated images?
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This is the price of war,
We rise with noble intentions,
And we risk all that is pure..." - Angela & Jeff van Dyck, Forever (Rome: Total War)
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The war continues on..." - Angela & Jeff van Dyck, We Are All One (Medieval 2: Total War)
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RogueIce wrote:Am I the only one who is excited we'll actually have an honest-to-God picture of our ninth planet ( :finger: International Astronomical Union) instead of computer generated images?
I, personally, am excited about the fact that we'll have lots of pictures of a representative very large Kuiper Belt object that isn't Triton. The opportunity to contrast the geological history of both bodies (as Triton would likely have experienced some sort of tidal heating as it was captured by Neptune,) is truly historic. (I'm sorry, but if Pluto is a planet, then so are Eris, Makemake, Sedna, Maumea, and possibly hundreds of as-yet-undiscovered giant KBOs ... but if your ideal solar system has 300 planets, then ... well, more power to you.)
Simon_Jester wrote:Although honestly, if we found a random rock the size of Mercury in the outer system, would we de-planetize Mercury, too?
If we found hundreds of them then perhaps we may. As it stands we're in a period of rapid gains when it comes to understanding the universe and we should expect some change in how we classify things as this happens.
Does it change anything about Mercury if we change what we call it? Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet?
I bet rose fans and breeders would take exception to roses being reclassified as a vegetable, yes
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Batman wrote:I bet rose fans and breeders would take exception to roses being reclassified as a vegetable, yes
Yes, but unlike classification of trade goods, I doubt calling a planet something different after discovering things that make us reconsider our original classification will effect anybody. Plus, if we did a genetic study that showed roses actually should be classified differently, should we not change their classification just due to social inertia?
Simon_Jester wrote:Although honestly, if we found a random rock the size of Mercury in the outer system, would we de-planetize Mercury, too?
I doubt it. One of the established criteria for a planet is that it has cleared out it's orbital path of other large objects. Pluto is part of the Kuiper belt so that's why it fell out of that designation. Mercury has a clear orbital path so it would still be a planet. If we found an object way out there in the Kuiper belt as large as one of the 8 known planets, it would have had to clear all other objects out of it's area for it to achieve planet status itself. Otherwise it's just a really huge dwarf planet (how's that for a contradiction?).
Now if a really huge dwarf planet were in fact discovered that far out, the public and the IAU are going to go apeshit all over again...
International Astronomical Union) instead of computer generated images?
