Johns Hopkins University APL, We Have Fly By!

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

For the firsthand source to the information I'm about to summarize, please visit this link to a fantastic (and historic) article:
Solar System Exploration: News & Events: News Archive: NASA's Three-Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic Encounter

THREE BILLION MILES IN 9.5 YEARS!!!! 

That's got to be some kind of record (among many).  This image was captured at a distance of 7,750 miles from Pluto's surface.  To put that distance into perspective on a relative scale, that's the distance from New York City to Mumbai, India!  The engineering feat and technological achievement of the whole New Horizons team deserves a huge deal of recognition!  

Let me highlight just a few points of "awe" the New Horizons mission achieved on its way to Pluto:

1.   All of the math!  New Horizons space travel trajectory, speeds, orbital swing boosts off the occasional celestial bodies, and possible unknown friction variables along the way were all calculated with such precision that the actual time of New Horizon's closest approach of Pluto was only off by a minute and it was a minute ahead at that!

2.   Going the distance! New Horizons "threaded the needle" upon its arrival path between Charon and Pluto within a 36-57 mile window in space of optimal observation!  As the article noted above points out "-- the equivalent of a commercial airliner arriving no more off target than the width of a tennis ball."

3.  That data though!  At the moment I'm writing this entry, New Horizons is radio silent, collecting all the data this 15 year program investment has led up to obtaining.  New Horizons is literally doing its "thang!" This evening (9pm-ish Eastern Standard Time), New Horizons will come back online and begin transmitting back to Earth (to Johns Hopkins University APL to be exact) its entire cache of science collected over the past nine and a half years.  That'll be no small uplink time either.  It's going to take about 16 months for us to receive all that data, all the while New Horizons will be traveling farther and farther away at speeds over 30,000 miles per hour!  

Now, we wait! 

To kill some time, as the excitement builds, I'll be taking my older kids and my niece to PlutoPalooza at the Scobee Planetarium tonight.  We're about to make some "I <3 Pluto" shirts to wear to the event!  

 

Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)