NEW YORK: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto’s doorstep, following an incredible journey of nine years and 4.8 billion kilometres.
Four weeks from Tuesday – on July 14 – New Horizons will make its closest approach to Pluto. The spacecraft will fly within 12,472 kilometres, inside the orbits of Pluto’s five known moons. That’s the approximate distance between Seattle and Sydney.
It will be the first spacecraft to explore the tiny, icy world once considered a full-fledged planet.
As of Tuesday, New Horizons was just over 32 million kilometres from Pluto. That’s closer than Earth is to neighbor Venus, at their closest point. Flight controllers fired a thruster on the spacecraft over the weekend to fine-tune its path.
“This is one charged-up team,” principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado said last week. “They know that they’re getting to do something very special because nothing like this has happened” since Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune in 1989. NASA’s first interplanetary success was at Venus, with Mariner 2 in 1962.
Stern added: “We’re going to turn a point of light into a planet and its moons overnight in the next month.”
The Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, is operating the spacecraft for NASA. The lab also designed and built the relatively lightweight craft, about the size of a baby grand piano. It carries seven science instruments; the cameras have been photographing the planet since January.
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