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

[amadeys]

Sellin пишет:

Когда же его забанят...

Да его на АВИАФОРУМЕ  забанили ( нёс ахинею про СуперПуперДжет ), теперь на космос перешел...

[Quoondо]

В чем проблема? Я может немного не в теме..в начале ветки пишут про то что можно "теоретически" использовать его ионник для того чтобы разогнать аппарата после плутона к поясу Койпера.. если что спросил неправильно, ответьте пожалуйста по нормальному..

[che wi]

New Horizons Crosses Neptune Orbit En Route to Historic Pluto Encounter
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20140825.php

August 25, 2014

NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft has traversed the orbit of Neptune. This is its last major crossing en route to becoming the first probe to make a close encounter with distant Pluto on July 14, 2015.

The sophisticated piano-sized spacecraft, which launched in January 2006, reached Neptune's orbit --nearly 2.75 billion miles fr om Earth -- in a record eight years and eight months. New Horizons' milestone matches precisely the 25th anniversary of the historic encounter of NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft with Neptune on Aug. 25, 1989.

"It's a cosmic coincidence that connects one of NASA's iconic past outer solar system explorers, with our next outer solar system explorer," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Exactly 25 years ago at Neptune, Voyager 2 delivered our 'first' look at an unexplored planet. Now it will be New Horizons turn to reveal the unexplored Pluto and its moons in stunning detail next summer on its way into the vast outer reaches of the solar system."

New Horizons now is about 2.48 billion miles from Neptune -- nearly 27 times the distance between the Earth and our sun -- as it crosses the giant planet's orbit at 10:04 p.m. EDT Monday. Although the spacecraft will be much farther from the planet than Voyager 2's closest approach, New Horizons' telescopic camera was able to obtain long-distance "approach" shots of Neptune on July 10.

Спойлер

"NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 explored the entire middle zone of the solar system wh ere the giant planets orbit," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Now we stand on Voyager's broad shoulders to explore the even more distant and mysterious Pluto system.

Several senior members of the New Horizons science team were young members of Voyager's science team in 1989. Many remember how Voyager 2's approach images of Neptune and its planet-sized moon Triton fueled anticipation of the discoveries to come. They share a similar, growing excitement as New Horizons begins its approach to Pluto.

"The feeling 25 years ago was that this was really cool, because we're going to see Neptune and Triton up-close for the first time," said Ralph McNutt, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, who leads the New Horizons energetic-particle investigation and served on the Voyager plasma-analysis team. "The same is happening for New Horizons. Even this summer, when we're still a year out and our cameras can only spot Pluto and its largest moon as dots, we know we're in for something incredible ahead."

Voyager's visit to the Neptune system revealed previously unseen features of Neptune itself, such as the Great Dark Spot, a massive storm similar to, but not as long-lived, as Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Voyager also, for the first time, captured clear images of the ice giant's ring system, too faint to be clearly viewed from Earth. "There were surprises at Neptune and there were surprises at Triton," said Ed Stone, Voyager's long-standing project scientist from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "I'm sure that will continue at Pluto."

Many researchers feel the 1989 Neptune flyby – Voyager's final planetary encounter – might have offered a preview of what's to come next summer. Scientists suggest that Triton, with its icy surface, bright poles, varied terrain and cryo-volcanos, is a Pluto-like object that Neptune pulled into orbit. Scientists recently restored Voyager's footage of Triton and used it to construct the best global color map of that strange moon yet – further whetting appetites for a Pluto close-up.

"There is a lot of speculation over whether Pluto will look like Triton, and how well they'll match up," McNutt said. "That's the great thing about first-time encounters like this – we don't know exactly what we'll see, but we know from decades of experience in first-time exploration of new planets that we will be very surprised."

Similar to Voyager 1 and 2's historic observations, New Horizons also is on a path toward potential discoveries in the Kuiper Belt, which is a disc-shaped region of icy objects past the orbit of Neptune, and other unexplored realms of the outer solar system and beyond.

"No country except the United States has the demonstrated capability to explore so far away," said Stern. "The U.S. has led the exploration of the planets and space to a degree no other nation has, and continues to do so with New Horizons. We're incredibly proud that New Horizons represents the nation again as NASA breaks records with its newest, farthest, and very capable planetary exploration spacecraft."

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched 16 days apart in 1977, and at least one of the spacecraft visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 now is the most distant human-made object, about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away from the sun. In 2012, it became the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. Voyager 2, the longest continuously operated spacecraft, is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from our sun.

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers program. APL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. APL also built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft.

The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The Voyager missions are part of NASA's Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate.

[свернуть]

з.ы. может я пропустил, но на сегодняшней конференции не услышал конкретики по поводу цели №2; просто сказали, что больше подробностей в этом плане будет до конца года

[RustemNur]

che wi пишет:
Короче, резюмирую ближайшие "вехи":

- 3 а.е. до цели №1 (макс. сближение с Плутоном)
- 1 год полёта до цели №1
- 30 а.е. от Солнца
- пересечение орбиты Нептуна

Тут НАСА со всем справилась.    
Чтобы совсем не заскучать: примерно через неделю будет 2.5 АЕ до цели.

[Vi1]

а 18 сентября - 300 дней до рандеву

[386DX]

Аллилуйя, ждём начала регулярных наблюдений за Плутоном =)
Во время сближения обещают картографировать практически всю поверхность Плутона, включая обширную область, не обращённую к Солнцу, где сейчас "полярная ночь". Она подсвечивается от Харона, но только наполовину - Плутон и Харон вращаются как единое целое (tidally locked то бишь). Вопрос такой - что там с участками, которые будут всё время оставаться в тени? По моим прикидкам, где-то 85 % поверхности получится отснять, так ведь?

[Salo]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/newhorizons/140831kuiperbelt/#.VAPyaKMrpeE

Follow-up destinations considered for New Horizons
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: August 31, 2014

Speeding through the outer solar system nearly 2.8 billion miles from Earth, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was put into hibernation mode Friday for the last in a series of power-saving sleeps as scientists on Earth prepare for a make-or-break encounter with Pluto next summer.
 
Artist's concept of the New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Kuiper Belt Object. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
 
 The hibernating spacecraft will send weekly status beacons back to Earth, with wakeup scheduled for Dec. 7 to begin the final phase of its approach to Pluto. New Horizons will stay awake for two years to prepare for the encounter, fly by Pluto, and downlink science data.
The craft's appointment with Pluto is set for July 14, 2015, when it will zoom about 6,200 miles from the icy world's unmapped surface for a one-shot chance to explore Pluto's geology and atmosphere.
New Horizons passed the orbit of Neptune on Aug. 25, the first spacecraft to reach such distances in a quarter-century.
"It's going to be a bonanza for science in so many ways, and we're going to take you along for all of this journey," said Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizon mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Stern said the New Horizons science team will use some of the three-month downtime to fish out new destinations for the probe, which has enough fuel to fly by one of the thousands of icy worlds in the Kuiper belt, a zone of Pluto-like objects that lies beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Kuiper Belt Objects, or KBOs, are a recent discovery. Astronomers only confirmed the existence of this new frontier of the solar system two decades ago, challenging assumptions about the boundaries of Pluto, and eventually relegating Pluto off the solar system's official list of planets.
NASA advertised the $700 million mission's capability to visit multiple destinations when New Horizons launched in January 2006, assuming new targets for the probe could be found in time.
"To explore them, we first have to find them," Stern said. "They're very faint. They're very far away. These are objects that are much smaller than pluto and probably much more primitive in terms of their chemistry and their appearance. These are objects the size of counties, for example, not the size of planets."
But the search for a follow-up target for New Horizons has, so far, come up empty.
 "We've been using the largest ground-based telescopes in the world for about four years, and although we've been discovering Kuiper Belt Objects, none have been in that region of space and and none within our fuel reach," Stern said.
In a last-ditch effort, NASA tasked the Hubble Space Telescope to search for another destination for New Horizons when ground-based surveys failed to find one.
"Hubble has done a spectacularly good job and yielded literally hundreds of images of that part of the sky, from which we've found some candidates," Stern said. "We don't know if any of them, though, are in our fuel reach and we won't still for some months."
Scientists need repeated observations of each object to measure their orbits and determine if they are within the spacecraft's reach. New Horizons carries a limited amount of fuel, so any decision on a targeted Kuiper Belt Object must account for the probe's capabilities.
Stern said a New Horizons flyby is possible from 2016 to 2021, with the most likely timeframe between 2018 and 2020.
"We hope to know before the year is out, and we will keep you posted as soon as we've made a determination of whether there are reachable objects," Stern said. "We certainly hope so."

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

 
These images from the Hubble Space Telescope were taken this summer in a candidate program to confirm the telescope's capability to find suitable targets for the New Horizons spacecraft. The image at left shows a Kuiper Belt Object at an estimated distance of approximately 4 billion miles from Earth. Its position noticeably shifts between exposures taken approximately 10 minutes apart. The image at right shows a second KBO at roughly a similar distance. The positions of these newly discovered objects are not consistent with any KBOs discovered previously. In reality, they are too faint to have been seen with ground-based telescopes (magnitudes 26.8 and 27.3, respectively). Scientists still must confirm whether these objects, or other candidates, are reachable by New Horizons. Credit: NASA/ESA/SwRI/JHUAPL/New Horizons KBO Search Team

[Vi1]

Примечательный факт - 3 января 2015 года, ввиду постепенного приближения Плутона к узловой точке своей орбиты с эклиптикой, он окажется фактически за Солнцем и пройдет примерно в 2 градусах от него, возникнет похожая ситуация как с марсианскими аппаратами, - невозможность радиообмена между Землей и бортом. Само пересечение Плутона с эклиптикой произойдет 25.10.2018 г.

[che wi]

Страничка "Pluto Picture of the Day"
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/ppod/

[RustemNur]

Имеем 2.5 АЕ до Плутона и сон до 7 декабря.

[che wi]

пускай здесь будет

[che wi]

New Horizons Makes its First Detection of Pluto's Moon Hydra
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20140912.php

[Димитър]

Кстати, на верхнем рисунке хорошо видно, что планеты чётко разделяются по наклону оси вращения к еклиптике на три группы:
1. Почти перпендикулярная к еклиптике ось - Меркурий, Венера, Юпитер
2. Средний наклон (от 23.5 до 26.5 градусов) - Земля, Марс, Сатурн, Нептун
3. "Лежащие планеты" - Уран и Плутон

К чему бы это ?

[che wi]

2,22 а.е. до Плутона (чило не круглое, конечно, но симпатичное     )

[pkl]

Димитър пишет:
Кстати, на верхнем рисунке хорошо видно, что планеты чётко разделяются по наклону оси вращения к еклиптике на три группы:
1. Почти перпендикулярная к еклиптике ось - Меркурий, Венера, Юпитер
2. Средний наклон (от 23.5 до 26.5 градусов) - Земля, Марс, Сатурн, Нептун
3. "Лежащие планеты" - Уран и Плутон

К чему бы это ?

К мегастолкновениям в начале времён.

[Чебурашка]

Плутон махонькое тело... С ним всё ясно.
А вот какой "снаряд"  нужен чтобы Уран на бок повалить? 

[che wi]

Чебурашка пишет:
А вот какой "снаряд" нужен чтобы Уран на бок повалить?  :o

Есть предположения о нескольких (два и более) столкновениях с крупными объектами (размера Земли).
Если не изменяет склероз, то вроде была также гипотеза об очень крупном спутнике , "раскачавшем" ось планеты.

[Vi1]

или гипотеза о пролетевшей "рядом" с Солнцем звезды-коричневый карлик или "горячий Юпитер"

[pkl]

Столкновение могло произойти на ранней стадии эволюции планеты, когда масса её "зародыша" была не столь уж и велика.

[Димитър]

pkl пишет:

Димитър пишет:
Кстати, на верхнем рисунке хорошо видно, что планеты чётко разделяются по наклону оси вращения к еклиптике на три группы:
1. Почти перпендикулярная к еклиптике ось - Меркурий, Венера, Юпитер
2. Средний наклон (от 23.5 до 26.5 градусов) - Земля, Марс, Сатурн, Нептун
3. "Лежащие планеты" - Уран и Плутон

К чему бы это ?

К мегастолкновениям в начале времён.

Столкновения не обясняют четкое разделение на 3 группы! Без специальной причины распределение наклонений должно быть равномерным.