NEW YORK: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has travelled five billion kilometers and almost completes its nine-year journey to Pluto. Sunday, it starts photographing the mysterious, unexplored, icy world once deemed a planet.
The first pictures will reveal little more than bright dots – New Horizons is still more than 160 million kilometers from Pluto. But the images, taken against star fields, will help scientists gauge the remaining distance and keep the baby grand piano sized robot on track for a July flyby.
It is humanity’s first trip to Pluto, and scientists are eager to start exploring.
“New Horizons has been a mission of delayed gratification in many respects, and it’s finally happening now,” said project scientist Hal Weaver of Johns Hopkins
University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “It’s going to be a sprint for the next seven months, basically, to the finish line … We can’t wait to turn Pluto into a real world, instead of just a little pixelated blob.”
Launched from Cape Canaveral in January 2006 on a $700 million US mission, New Horizons awoke from its last hibernation period early last month. Flight controllers have spent the past several weeks getting the spacecraft ready for the final but most important leg of its journey.
The spacecraft’s longrange reconnaissance imager will take hundreds of pictures of Pluto over the coming months. These new pictures should be considerably brighter. It will be a few days before the new images are beamed back to Earth; scientists expect to release them publicly in early February.
Pluto was still officially a planet, No. 9 in the solar system lineup, when New Horizons departed Earth.
