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On July 14, 2015, the spacecraft New Horizons will come within 7,767 miles of (former planet) Pluto. The probe has been traveling for six years already, covering a million kilometers every day, and broke a record on Friday by becoming the closet spacecraft to Pluto ever. The previous record was 1.58 billion kilometers, when Voyager I came its closest to Pluto in 1986.
“We’ve come a long way across the solar system,” says Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “When we launched [on Jan. 19, 2006] it seemed like our 10-year journey would take forever, but those years have been passing us quickly. We’re almost six years in flight, and it’s just about three years until our encounter begins.”
From New Horizons’ current distance to Pluto – about as far as Earth is from Saturn – Pluto remains just a faint point of light. But by the time New Horizons sails through the Pluto system in mid-2015, the planet and its moons will be so close that the spacecraft’s cameras will spot features as small as a football field.
Get ready for your closeups, Pluto! Link
You thought that Saturn’s moon Mimas looks like the Death Star? The Cassini probe analyzed temperature differences on the surface of Mimas and determined that it is actually Pac-man! Link -via Digg
(image credit: NSA/JPL/SSI)
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As they say, the third time is the charm. Three different missions to the moon have relayed back evidence of water. There were traces of water in the moon rocks brought back by Apollo, but that was attributed to contamination. Three more recent examinations have found evidence of water: India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe detected water by mapping wavelengths of light from the moon’s surface, the Cassini probe found evidence of global distribution of the water signal, and the Deep Impact spacecraft found evidence by infrared detection.
“The Deep Impact observations of the Moon not only unequivocally confirm the presence of [water/hydroxyl] on the lunar surface, but also reveal that the entire lunar surface is hydrated during at least some portion of the lunar day,” the authors wrote in their study.
The findings of all three spacecraft “provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of hydroxyl or water,” said Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii in an opinion essay accompanying the three studies. Lucey was not involved in any of the missions.
The new data “prompt a critical reexamination of the notion that the moon is dry. It is not,” Lucey wrote.
The amount of water on the moon is miniscule by Earth standards, with one ton of lunar surface holding about 32 ounces. Link -via Digg
