А теперь к Плутону (АМС New Horizons / Новые горизонты)

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https://twitter.com/NewHorizons2015/status/356021036036268032

After flying by Pluto the New Horizons team plans to flyby ancient Kuiper Belt Objects and explore the outer heliosphere 2017-2035!

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Ровно 2 года.

[FarEcho]

instml пишет:
 
...МОСКВА, 11 июл — РИА Новости. Американский межпланетный зонд New Horizons получил первые космические снимки Харона...
... На текущий момент New Horizons находится между орбитами Юпитера и Сатурна, в 885 миллионах километров от своей цели — Плутона...

Ну ладно, в РИА Новости народ в космической тематике слегка девственный, но вы-то как проглядели при цитировании. Давно уже станция летит за орбитой Урана.

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https://dnnpro.outer.jhuapl.edu/plutoscience/Home.aspx

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http://i.minus.com/ibvmngZNbERqIC.gif

Цветная и вращающаяся карта Плутона!

https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/357920599919702018

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~buie/pluto/hrcmap.html

[Salo]

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_07_29_2013_p21-600034.xml&p=1

New Horizons Flyby Plan In Place
By Frank Morring, Jr.
Source: Aviation Week & Space Technology


Credit: NASA/APL

July 29, 2013

Scientists on the New Horizons mission are beginning to plan in earnest how they will evaluate the data that will begin flowing back fr om Pluto in less than two years, when the nuclear-powered probe begins sending "better than Hubble" imagery of the distant body and its satellites.
The spacecraft's Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (Lorri) has already resolved Pluto and Charron, its largest satellite, into two distinct objects (see image, page 22). With the resolution improving by the day, the mission team has planned and uploaded its flyby choreography, and has sent out a call to astronomers for parallel observation fr om Earth and its environs before, during and after the July 14, 2015, encounter.

Спойлер

The team also has completed a rehearsal with the spacecraft, and conducted a detailed scientific workshop at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) here, where New Horizons was built. There are no plans to retarget the probe again.
"The security that we get by knowing that we've practiced all of these observations on the spacecraft outweighs the flexibility that we would want to be able to do any last-minute targeting," says astronomer Leslie Young of the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI), who led the team that planned the encounter.
On a mission that has been under consideration since before NASA launched its first Voyager mission to the outer planets on Sept. 5. 1977, long before Pluto was downgraded fr om the ninth planet to a Kuiper Belt object large enough to be termed a dwarf planet, the two years remaining before the flyby are a virtual blink of the eye. Planning for the encounter started in 2000, when the New Horizons team was preparing its mission proposal, and started "in earnest" after the spacecraft hurtled past Jupiter and gave its operators some experience collecting data at a real planet.
"We are really at this moment, in July of 2013, kicking off this encounter," says SWRI's Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator. "We've just finished a nine-day close encounter rehearsal on the spacecraft. The spacecraft performed flawlessly. The entire close-approach sequence was put up on the spacecraft, and it ran from July 5 to July 14, and the spacecraft got an A-plus."
The mission-science conference at APL gave researchers an idea of what they can expect to receive in the year-and-a-half that it will take after the close encounter to transmit all the data over the 5 billion km (3 billion mi.) that will separate New Horizons from Earth. There are seven instruments on New Horizons, carefully sel ected after a lot of scientific argument to glean as much information about the outer Solar System as possible. The ink on textbooks rewritten to accommodate discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope is barely dry, but the scientists here expect they will need to be rewritten again once the spacecraft draws close enough to the Pluto system to incorporate an unprecedented flood of information about the unexplored region.
"When I went to graduate school and I learned about astronomy, the Solar System had a very different architecture," says Stern, who is 55. "What I now call the middle Solar System used to be called the outer Solar System, and the entire geography of the Kuiper Belt and all the small planets there was not even known, with the exception of Pluto."
The public is likely to be most taken with early data returning from the spacecraft's cameras, which will be imaging Pluto and its moons beginning in January 2015. Five of them are known. The largest of them, Charon, was discovered in 1978. The smallest, named Styx, turned up last year, and no one will be surprised if more are spotted as New Horizons approaches.
"We've planned particular observations to look for small satellites, many of them going deep, deep imaging with the panchromatic camera," says Young. "We even took one of our color scans of Pluto and Charon and extended the duration of it to cover the entire system. So, even if we discover an object in the data a year and a half after encounter, we can go back and say there ought to have been a moon there."
It is also possible that the probe will discover planetary rings, and researchers have long been planning how they will study the tenuous atmosphere they expect to find, and how it interacts with the solar wind.
New Horizons carries three imagers. Lorri is a simple 20.8-cm (8.2-in.) telescope that will generate images with a resolution as fine as 100 meters (330 ft.) on the planet's surface at closest approach. Also onboard are visible/infrared and ultraviolet imager/spectrometers dubbed Ralph and Alice, respectively. Ralph will generate color maps and data on composition and temperatures; Alice will study atmospheres at Pluto and perhaps Charon.
The Radio Science Experiment (Rex) is a passive radiometer that will measure the composition and temperatures of atmospheres it encounters at Pluto and perhaps elsewh ere. The Solar Wind Around Pluto instrument will measure atmospheric escape at the dwarf planet, and its interaction with the solar wind, while the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation will study plasma leaving the atmosphere.
The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, built as an education project by students at the University of Colorado and elsewh ere, has been at work since the probe was launched on Jan. 19, 2006, measuring the interplanetary dust along the trajectory.
The science team has just started polling astronomers who use telescopes on and in orbit around Earth to mount an observation campaign that will collect data in parallel with New Horizons' passage through the Pluto system. In addition to more moons, scientists hope to identify at least one Kuiper Belt object beyond Pluto and retarget the probe for a flyby of that object.
The job will be "like looking for somebody sending Morse code signals from a New York City apartment building," Young says, because the center of the Milky Way galaxy lies behind the target region. But observations from Hawaii have enjoyed "good seeing," she says, and the team is hopeful the campaign will discover a good Kuiper Belt target.
The encounter with Pluto itself will be broken into phases that begin on Jan. 6, 2015, says Young.
"Approach Phase 1, wh ere we're just beginning our science, mostly doing optical navigation," she says. "Approach Phase 2 [April 4-June 23, 2015] we begin to pass Hubble resolution and our science picks up. Approach Phase 3 is when we start to do our more exciting science in our last few rotations before closest approach. All of our [priority] required science objectives are taking in the near-encounter phase, just a day before and a day after encounter, and then as we leave on the departure phase, things slow down."
Stern says the team is "really looking forward to knocking people's socks off" with "several hundred scientific activities" in the final week before closest encounter and "several hundred more" in the closest two days. Surface imagery with resolution comparable to the Voyager images of Triton are likely, and maps of frost on Pluto's far side are possible.
"The data sets that are going to come down from New Horizons are absolutely mouth-watering," says Stern, who helped overcome opposition from then-NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to send the mission on its way. "Because of the diversity and sophistication of the instruments in this payload, there really hasn't been anything like this in the entire history of planetary exploration for a first encounter. . . . We will exceed Hubble resolution not for a week or two, but fr om April to October. We will image every one of Pluto's satellites and Pluto itself. We will make compositional maps of Pluto and Charon and Nix, and unresolved compositional information on the other three known satellites. We will map certain temperature fields. We'll measure Pluto's [atmospheric] escape rate. We'll determine its temperature and pressure structure as a function of altitude; we'll address interior models and do many, many other things relating to the satellites, the system and the environment."

[свернуть]

[scream]

Окончательно выбрана схема пролета АМС «Новые горизонты» через систему Плутона.

Ученые и инженеры миссии «Новые горизонты» начинают серьезную подготовку к пролету автоматической станции сквозь систему Плутона. Менее чем через два года космический аппарат, оснащенный ядерной энергетической установкой, сблизится с бывшей девятой планетой Солнечной системы и ее спутниками.

Камера высокого разрешения LoRRI (Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager) уже разрешила на снимках Плутон и Харон, его крупнейший спутник, на два отдельных объекта. С получением снимков, чье разрешение улучшается день ото дня, рабочая группа миссии распланировала точную схему пролета и предложила астрономам провести параллельные наблюдения Плутона с Земли до, во время и после него. Также команда провела детальные репетиции пролета с участием «Новых горизонтов».

«Безопасность и уверенность, которые мы получили, зная, что мы уже отрепетировали все наблюдения и операции со станцией во время пролета, перевешивают гибкость планирования всего «в последнюю минуту», – говорит астроном Лесли Янг из Юго-западного Научно-исследовательского института (SWRI), возглавивший команду, планирующую схему пролета.

Планирование пролета началось в 2000 году, когда команда «Новых горизонтов» готовила свои предложения по миссии, а всерьез к нему приступили уже после пролета Юпитера, который дал операторам станции некоторый опыт сбора данных о реальной планете.

«Мы действительно только что, в июле 2013 года, «прошли», отработали это сближение, – говорит Алан Стерн, научный руководитель миссии. – Мы только что завершили репетицию 9 суток максимального сближения с Плутоном с участием космического корабля. Станция отработала безупречно. С 5 по 14 июля была совершена вся последовательность необходимых действий, которые будут проделаны во время реального пролета, и станция получила А-плюс».

После сближения с Плутоном пройдет полтора года, прежде чем все данные, полученные станцией, будут переданы на Землю. Причина заключается в огромном расстоянии, которое разделит Землю и «Новые горизонты» – 5 млрд. км.

Семь научных инструментов станции были тщательно отобраны для получения максимального количества информации о внешней части Солнечной системы. Команда «Новых горизонтов» считает, что после пролета станции сквозь систему Плутона учебники по астрономии снова придется переписывать, как это уже было сделано по результатам работы космического телескопа им. Хаббла.

Владислава Ананьева
http://stp.cosmos.ru/index.php?id=1137&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=5134&cHash=4f055641eb34b8cf23b48132942c8ab2

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Pluto Science Conference Exceeds Expectations

August 1, 2013
 


New Horizons 101. New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern discusses the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt during a public lecture in APL's Kossiakoff Center on July 23. "We live in a special place," he said. "Only the United States is capable of exploring the outer solar system ... we are rewriting textbooks that kids will read all around the world." .

Compressing eight decades of discoveries into five days, more than 100 scientists met last week at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., to talk everything Pluto – what we already know, what we'd like to know, and what data we expect NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to deliver after its historic flight past the distant planet in the summer of 2015.
 
 Led by New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of APL, the New Horizons team organized the meeting – The Pluto System on the Eve of Exploration by New Horizons: Perspectives and Predictions – from July 22-26 to bring the diverse range of knowledge and views about the Pluto system to one forum. They also invited ideas for ground-based and satellite observations that could supplement the New Horizons encounter, and shared details of the mission and spacecraft with scientists from the U.S. and other countries interested in analyzing the data returned from New Horizons.
 
 "The conference exceeded our expectations," said Weaver, "with a lot of brainstorming by planetary science experts about what we might see when the New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto in 2015."
 
 The meeting included 103 talks, 30 poster presentations, and 13 topical sessions covering nearly every imaginable aspect of the Pluto system, including atmospheres, moons, dust and rings, magnetospheres, surface composition and geology, system origins, surface-atmosphere interactions, Kuiper Belt context, and, of course, the planned New Horizons encounter.
 
 New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, said a variety of papers presented at the conference will be submitted to the journal Icarus. Stern also told participants to mark their calendars for a summer 2017 science conference to digest New Horizons results; New Horizons makes its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, and will need about a year to send home all the uncompressed data from its digital recorders. Deliveries to the Planetary Data System are also planned in 2016 and early 2017.
 
 "This spacecraft and this team is stoked to make the first flyby of a Kuiper Belt planet and to revolutionize what we know about the Pluto system," Stern said. "We begin in just 18 months, in January 2015!"

New Horizons Deputy Project Scientist Kim Ennico covered the conference from start to finish; read her blogs here.
The Twitterverse was alive with Pluto Science talk throughout the week.

Read the abstracts from the meeting (12 MB PDF).



How many planets? Pluto conference scientists – holding up nine fingers – express their opinion on Pluto's planethood.
 
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20130801.php

[Soligorsk]

 Уже конец августа на носу, что-нибудь новое есть по АМС?

[pkl]

Рано ещё.

[scream]

ждём снимков на следующий год!

[pkl]

И в следующем году мы ничего принципиально нового на картинках не увидим!

[Soligorsk]

Да просто важен факт того, что АМС ещё жива. И хотелось бы хотя бы раз в месяц это слышать А не так как с ЧИБИСом :cry:

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99 недель до пролета Плутона.

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Отставить панику!
Все ссылки давно накиданы в тему.
В частности, твиттер и официальный сайт.
АМС успешно погрузилась в спящий режим днем 21 августа (UTC, ground time). Подтверждение получено.
Выход из спящего режима запланирован на 5 января 2014 г. (примерно через 135 дней и более чем 100 млн км полета).
https://twitter.com/NewHorizons2015/status/370201379714789377
https://twitter.com/NewHorizons2015/status/370226929397288960

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Непостоянная рубрика "Рулящие Новыми Горизонтами".

Alice Bowman: Mission Operations Manager (MOM).

Alice Bowman: APL's First Female MOM

http://www.jhuapl.edu/aboutapl/meet/bowman.asp

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Late in Cruise, and a Binary Ahoy

August 23, 2013

Alan Stern

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspective.php?page=piPerspective_08_23_2013

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До Земли 26,46 а.е.
До Солнца 27,12 а.е.
До Плутона 5,50 а.е.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php

[Soligorsk]

Много информации, но на английском. Просто если кому-то не сложно, то хоть раз в месяц говорить - полёт нормальный.

[ronatu]

Soligorsk пишет:
полёт нормальный.

Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.
Полёт нормальный.