This is what Pluto and Charon look like from 3,600,000,000 kilometers. The picture was snapped by NASA’s New Horizons probe which expects to flyby the planet in 2015. Expected future highpoints for the mission are:
- June 9, 2008 -- Pass Saturn’s orbit.
- March 5, 2011 -- Pass Uranus’ orbit.
- August 1, 2014 -- Pass Neptune’s orbit.
- July 14, 2015 -- Flyby of Pluto around 11:59 UTC at 11096 km, 13.780 km/s
- July 14, 2015 -- Flyby of Charon around 12:13 UTC at 26927 km, 13.875 km/s
- 2016-2020 -- possible flyby of one or more Kuiper Belt objects.
Set your alarms accordingly.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Today's guest blog post is by Featured Science Author Dr. Fred Bortz
Tune in Thursday, June 13th on our Facebook page at 10 am EST to discuss this post with Dr. Bortz!
More than ten years after it was posted at the "Ask Dr. Fred" page "Why Isn't Pluto a Planet Anymore?" remains by far the most…
Did you ever notice that Pluto doesn't have much of a tail? No, not that Pluto! This Pluto:
This has been known for a while. NASA noted this last year:
New Horizons has discovered a region of cold, dense ionized gas tens of thousands of miles beyond Pluto -- the planet’s atmosphere being…
If you happen to be in the Bryan/College Station area tomorrow, you might consider checking out the Texas A&M Physics Festival. It's sort of an open house with a ridiculous number of top-notch physics demonstrations as well as some very interesting talks. It's free! I'll be there helping out…
"We really expect the mission to be transformational. This is the capstone of the original visits to the planets. It takes us 4 billion miles away and 4 billion years back in time." -Alan Stern
When the Hubble Space Telescope discovered additional moons of Pluto, beyond Charon, it was speculated…