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

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По вашему, температуру на поверхности Луны, можно померить только градусником? Или - прочитать в википедии???

Можно дистанционно, измеряя инфракрасное излучение. Но при наличии облаков на планете, температуру на ее поверхности не измеришь дистанционно, измерится температура облака..

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http://www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7003&start=0 вот тема специально для вас, а тут про Новые Горизонты.[/quote]
Спасибо вам! Единственное, хочу отметить, что возможно существование газового гиганта у внутренней границы облака Оорта. Но не ближе 1000 а.е. от Солнца. Но про это думать не стоит, хотя бы потому что это в 40 раз дальше Нептуна.

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Согласен. Единственная поправочка. К Плутону не стоит пока АМС отправлять с выходом на орбиту и спускаемым аппаратом. Лучше к Урану или Нептуну с двумя спускаемыми аппаратами на крупнейший спутник и на саму планету, особенно на планету. На поверхности Урана и Нептуна венерианское давление, и какая поверхность мы там не знаем. Это даст массу ценных сведений. Хотя бы потому что, нам еще сложнее представить там условия на поверхности, чем полвека назад на Марсе.

Ну Плутон как бэ не единственная его цель
Фактически Новые Горизонты - это звиздалет и имеет целью посмотреть че там за Плутоном есть

[FarEcho]

...Фактически Новые Горизонты - это звиздалет и имеет целью посмотреть че там за Плутоном есть

Что за Плутоном, надеюсь, посмотрим, а на звездолет New Horizons не тянет. Чтобы покинуть пределы солнечной системы ему скорости не хватит.

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...Фактически Новые Горизонты - это звиздалет и имеет целью посмотреть че там за Плутоном есть

Что за Плутоном, надеюсь, посмотрим, а на звездолет New Horizons не тянет. Чтобы покинуть пределы солнечной системы ему скорости не хватит.

хватит

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...Фактически Новые Горизонты - это звиздалет и имеет целью посмотреть че там за Плутоном есть

Что за Плутоном, надеюсь, посмотрим, а на звездолет New Horizons не тянет. Чтобы покинуть пределы солнечной системы ему скорости не хватит.

Пионеры и Вояджеры уже стали звиздалетами
А Горизонты летит куда быстрее - ему даже гравитационные маневры ап Газовые Гиганты не нужны

[FarEcho]

...на звездолет New Horizons не тянет. Чтобы покинуть пределы солнечной системы ему скорости не хватит.

хватит

Да, действительно хватит, тут я маху дал.

Пионеры и Вояджеры уже стали звиздалетами
А Горизонты летит куда быстрее - ему даже гравитационные маневры ап Газовые Гиганты не нужны

New Horizons  стартовал быстрее, но тот же Voyager-1 он уже не догонит, так как тот за счет упомянутых гравитационных маневров набрал гораздо большую скорость (на отметке в 100 ае у New Horizons будет около 13 км/сек, а у Voyager-1 примерно 17 км/сек)

[Потусторонний]

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New Horizons Aims to Put Its Stamp on History
February 1, 2012

New Horizons' flight to explore the Pluto system in July 2015 will be a historic accomplishment for the U.S. space program, for planetary science, and indeed for all humankind.

Plans for the flyby are well under way – and now, so is an effort to petition the U.S. Postal Service to commemorate the historic achievements of New Horizons on a stamp. The mission team launches that petition today, in early 2012, and plans to submit the petitioners' names and a formal proposal to the U.S. post office knowing it often takes three years or longer for a proposal to result in an actual stamp.

"You can help make this happen," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. "We're asking people to sign the petition, because the post office considers not just the merits of a new stamp proposal, but also whether it is supported by a significant number of people. This is a chance for us all to celebrate what American space exploration can achieve though hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry, and the uniquely human drive to explore."

The Southwest Research Institute's Dan Durda, a space scientist and artist whose works appear on the New Horizons website and many other venues, has designed a concept for a new Pluto stamp – which would be the successor to the 1990 U.S. postage stamp that labeled Pluto as "Not Yet Explored."

You can help by signing the petition urging the post office's Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee to recommend a New Horizons stamp to the postmaster general. Tell your family members, Facebook friends and Twitter followers to sign as well!

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20120201.php
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/stamp/stamp/New_Horizons_USPS_Stamp_Petition.html

[Сергио]

...на звездолет New Horizons не тянет. Чтобы покинуть пределы солнечной системы ему скорости не хватит.

хватит

Да, действительно хватит, тут я маху дал.

Пионеры и Вояджеры уже стали звиздалетами
А Горизонты летит куда быстрее - ему даже гравитационные маневры ап Газовые Гиганты не нужны

New Horizons  стартовал быстрее, но тот же Voyager-1 он уже не догонит, так как тот за счет упомянутых гравитационных маневров набрал гораздо большую скорость (на отметке в 100 ае у New Horizons будет около 13 км/сек, а у Voyager-1 примерно 17 км/сек)

давайте пульнём чего нибудь с гравиманёврами, топливом как у ФГ, движками как у хаябусы к сисриусу.

ибо - если пульнём к центавре - американцы сделают шоу из пуляния по сириусу.

можно и попроще - болванку с уголковыми отражателями, всё равно у разработчиков и исполнителей руки кривые.

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Видео: http://www.viewbix.com/v/Vote-and-Pass-it-On-/2f7e0e88-3a99-4c30-bf8b-d7cd95227487

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New Horizons on Approach: 22 AU Down, Just 10 to Go
February 10, 2012

Few spacecraft travel 10 astronomical units during their entire mission. But with New Horizons already logging more than twice that distance on its way to Pluto, coming to within 10 AU of its main target is akin to entering the home stretch.



An astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun, about 93 million miles or 149 million kilometers. At around 4:55 Universal Time on Feb. 11 (or late tonight in the U.S.), New Horizons crosses to within 10 AU of the Pluto system. To the team that has guided the piano-sized probe since its launch in January 2006, that means approach distances that used to be marked in billions of miles can be counted in millions, and astronomical units to go are listed in single digits.

Even time seems much shorter, now that the mission has entered the final three-year segment of its nine-plus year interplanetary trek from Earth to Pluto. The voyage culminates in the historic flight past Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015, though encounter operations start several months earlier. ["Three years from now, encounter operations will already have begun, and we'll be beginning the exploration of frontier planet Pluto and its system of moons," says Alan Stern, New Horizons mission principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute.

Not that spacecraft itself is marking any of this, mind you. New Horizons is currently in hibernation, more than 2.1 billion miles (nearly 3.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, racing outbound at 34,000 miles per hour. Operators at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., will rouse New Horizons in late April for a comprehensive, two-month-long systems and instruments checkout.

The Fast Track
New Horizons covers nearly a million miles of space a day – and that pace is evident when you check the spacecraft's path. New Horizons was 20 astronomical units from Pluto in November 2008; today that distance is 10 AU (which, for scale, is slightly more than the average space between Saturn and the sun). In October 2013, New Horizons will be just 5 AU away. It reaches a single AU in March 2015, with the Pluto encounter campaign in full swing.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20120210.php

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Where are the big Kuiper belt objects?

Earlier today I wrote a post about how to calculate the position of a body in space from its orbital elements. The particular reason I wanted this information now was because, for a project I'm working on, I'm trying to get a big-picture view of what's going on in trans-Neptunian space. Planets are in fairly circular orbits mostly confined to the ecliptic, so to understand their position in the solar system you really only need one piece of information: their average distance from the Sun. Earth is at 1 AU, Mars at about 1.5, Jupiter 5, and Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune at about 10, 20, and 30. Of course at different times they're at different positions in their orbits, but to a great extent you can predict the properties of a planet just by knowing how far from the Sun it is.

But Pluto and its neighbors generally have much more elliptical and inclined orbits, so average distance from the Sun just isn't enough information to let me form a mental picture of what's going on out there. I want to know: how far away are they now? How far and close do they get? And are they now going farther away or getting closer? Of the big eight objects that we know about (Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Quaoar, Varuna, Orcus, and 2007 OR10), do any of them share similar orbits?

You can write down a table of basic orbital information -- semimajor axis, eccentricity, inclination -- but I can't make a picture of the solar system by staring at that table. I know that Pluto is relatively close and actually is sometimes closer to the Sun than Neptune, and I know that Eris is really far, but other than that, I've got no idea where these things are.

I have seriously spent day and night for almost a week ruminating about which orbital information is useful, and how to present it, and finally today I came up with a way that helps me begin to get a sense for what's going on out there. Here's the diagram I came up with; an explanation follows it. I think that this is just the start of what will be a very detailed diagram that gives a snapshot of the Kuiper belt, and I'd welcome input on it. I do ask that you not reproduce it without asking, as it's very much a work in progress and there's lots of things I want to do with it.

The X-axis is range from the Sun, in astronomical units (AU). The Y-axis is heliocentric latitude (the angular elevation of the object above the planet of the ecliptic). The closed loops show the path in range-latitude space that the eight biggest objects travel over time. The loops actually represent 600 years' worth of HORIZONS predictions of orbital positions (from 1600 to 2200), which loop repeatedly for the closer bodies but barely more than once for the most distant bodies.

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003381/

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@NewHorizons2015
New Horizons will wake up from hibernation on April 30 for 2+ months of checkouts, science, and our 1st in flight encounter day rehearsal!

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https://twitter.com/NewHorizons2015

Green beacon from space yesterday! New Horizons is nearing the half-way between the orbits of Uranus & Neptune.

@martinwass New Horizons has the fuel & power to operate till almost 2040, if NASA can fund the mission into the Kuiper Belt & Oort Cloud.

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Alice Bowman: APL's First Female MOM

As New Horizons Mission Operations Manager (MOM) and group supervisor of the Space Department's Space Mission Operations Group, Alice Bowman's most interesting days at work are the ones where the unexpected happens. Fortunately for her, in the world of deep-space exploration, that potential exists almost every day. After 23 years in the field of space, Bowman has learned a lot about making the most of the daily twists and turns of the missions she manages. One of the most important lessons translates easily to daily life: "You just can't overreact when things happen, you have to stay calm," says Bowman.

To illustrate her point, she recounts a story about the first time New Horizons (APL's mission to Pluto) went into "safe mode." The spacecraft experienced some problems, telemetry was lost, and alarms were sounding in mission operations center. "Your first reaction is always to try to fix things right away...but sometimes, waiting for the spacecraft to take care of itself for a certain period of time—like it's programmed to—is what you need to do," says Bowman. "In the case of New Horizons, waiting gave us insight about what was going on and time to plan how we could best resolve the issue."

Bowman hasn't always been so knowledgeable about spacecraft (a physics and chemistry major in college, she started her career analyzing infrared detectors in the defense industry), but she has always been driven. As a child, she sat down with the other eight-year-olds in her neighborhood at 5:30 each evening to watch Lost in Space and she was riveted to the screen. She knew she'd be a space explorer one day—there was really no question in her mind.

"I never felt like I couldn't do anything I wanted," said Bowman. "I was determined to be like the folks I admired on Star Trek and Lost in Space." And, while she's never donned a spacesuit, Bowman is thrilled to spend her days in the field of space—"making history" as APL's first female MOM.

For Bowman, it is tough to name her most remarkable day at work; after all, dealing with space exploration of the planets is remarkable in itself. But thoughtfully, she describes the short time frame in which New Horizons reached Jupiter in the mission's initial phases on its trip to Pluto and how amazed the team was when they saw the spectacle as it was captured by the imaging instruments.

"The imaging of the planet, its moons and its rings, was like nothing we'd ever seen before," said Bowman. "Our team was exhausted by the process of getting to that phase, but when those first images came back, it was all worth it and we were re-energized. We even captured the volcano on Io (one of Jupiter's moons) erupting."

The daily creativity necessary for MESSENGER's mission to Mercury is also notable in Bowman's mind. "Mercury is hard to get to, and to save propellant for more science observations, the team's gotten very innovative using the solar panels (solar sailing) to correct smaller trajectory errors; this has allowed us to make minute changes in course without the use of propellant," she says.

In her downtime, Bowman is a clarinetist and bassist who enjoys collaborating outside of the Laboratory with others, including her husband, Robert, a mandolin and guitar player, and son, Noah, a banjo, guitar, and harmonica player, who share her passion for music. "My work-life can be unpredictable, but every other Wednesday my husband and I host a community outreach jam session at the West Laurel Senior Center. No matter how busy the day was, I am always glad when I get there," she says.

The collaborative relationship and dedication to a craft that she shares with her fellow musicians is similar to the close relationship of the small teams of APL space scientists and engineers working on extraordinary missions like MESSENGER and New Horizons. "We spend a lot of time and long hours together during the missions," says Bowman. "As a result, we form very close team bonds focused on a shared common goal."

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

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http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K12/K12FA9.html опубликованы данные по KBO 2004 LV31 и 2004 LW31, открытым с помощью http://www.icehunters.org/

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To sum up some of the data of http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K12/K12FA9.html

2004 LV31 is a KBO with an orbital period of 291 years, a semi-major axis of 43,95 AU, a perihelion of 38,30 AU and an eccentricity of 0,1288. It also has an absolute visual magnitude of 8,8 used by cpanek to calculate the estimated diameter mentionned above (around 30-40 km).

2004 LW31 is a KBO with an orbital period of 316 years, a semi-major axis of 46,39 AU, a perihelion of 43,09 AU and an eccentricity of 0,0712. It also has an absolute visual magnitude of 6,9 used by cpanek to calculate the estimated diameter mentionned above (around 75-110 km).

Here are some elements of comparison with Earth, Neptune and Pluto:

Orbital period

Earth: 1 year, Neptune: 164,79, Pluto: 248,81 years, 2004_LV31: 291 years, 2004_LW31: 316 years

Semi-major axis

Earth: 1 AU, Neptune: 30,11 AU, Pluto: 39,26 AU, 2004_LV31: 43,95 AU, 2004_LW31: 46,39 AU

Perihelion

Earth: 0,98 AU, Neptune: 29,77 AU, Pluto: 29,66 AU, 2004_LV31: 38,30 AU, 2004_LW31: 43,09 AU

Eccentricity

Earth: 0,0167, Neptune: 0,0086, Pluto: 0,2488, 2004_LV31: 0,1288, 2004_LW31: 0,0712

(c) amphisbene

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Седну уменьшили в размерах

Один из компаньонов Плутона только что попал под сокращение: выяснилось, что в действительности Седна меньше, чем принято считать.

Этот транснептуновый объект обнаружили в 2003 году. На тот момент он был самым удалённым планетоподобным телом Солнечной системы: его орбита более чем вдвое дальше от Солнца, чем орбита Плутона. (Вскоре после этого астрономы объявили об открытии ещё более далёкого тела, названного Эридой.)

По предварительным оценкам на основе оптической яркости, Седна оказалась на треть меньше Плутона. Новые инфракрасные наблюдения показали, что диаметр Седны составляет всего 43% диаметра Плутона.

Андраш Пал из обсерватории Конколи (Венгрия) и его коллеги воспользовались космическим телескопом «Гершель». Седна излучает в дальней инфракрасной части спектра, ибо чрезвычайно холодна. Там, в 13 млрд км от Солнца, температура поверхности держится на уровне 20 К. Все попытки разглядеть Седну с помощью другой инфракрасной орбитальной обсерватории — «Спитцер» — закончились неудачей.

Новые наблюдения показывают, что Седна отражает треть солнечного излучения, достигающего её, — гораздо больше, чем ожидалось. Это означает, что объект должен быть очень маленьким, ибо отражает так много света, но остаётся чрезвычайно тусклым. Г-н Пал и его коллеги пришли к выводу, что Седна имеет в поперечнике всего 995 км, то есть она меньше даже Харона, самого большого спутника Плутона.

Напомним: однажды Плутон пережил такую же переоценку. Полвека назад он считался крупнее Меркурия. Теперь-то мы знаем, что в действительности он примерно вдвое меньше ближайшей к Солнцу планеты.

http://science.compulenta.ru/674314/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120418-pluto-sedna-smaller-size-herschel-infrared-space-science/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0899

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The 1st long term hibernation science data collection by our plasma spectrometers is complete! Data downloads in May--science never sleeps!

Green beacon today-- next Monday we wake her up!

Today & tomorrow: New Horizons science team mtg in Boulder, organizing data pipelines, analysis tools, task responsibilities for Pluto!

Update on our search for KBOs for our extended mission: Finding dozens of KBOs now, but none yet within our fuel reach. Searching continues.

Ever wonder why Pluto's small moons are hard to study? Nix & Hydra r 5000x fainter than Pluto, P4 is 50,000x fainter than Pluto!

NH is planning a comprehensive imaging campaign on approach to search for, get orbits, colors & lightcurves of moons not known before the flyby