Welcome to Brain Space!
I don’t talk much, but I like space and I have a brain, share in some space with me!

In July, 2015, one man, boldly went where none other had gone before.

He sent back data, photos, analysis of a word, never seen by human eyes.

Alright… You caught me, it’s not been seen by any living eyes yet either. The ashes of Clyde Tombaugh were the only cargo aboard the NASA space probe, New Horizons.  His ashes and this little probe are also the fastest part man and man made objects currently speeding out of our solar system, it won’t take long for it to pass Voyager one which is currently sending us back information on the Heliosheath, that’s the outermost boundary of our stars weather.

New Horizons was launched on January 19th in 2006, it seems like a long time ago now, right? It wasn’t so long for the probe itself. The journey took 9 years and 5 months, during most of that journey, it spent most of it’s time in sleep mode, a low power setting where only the core functions to report diagnostic information back to NASA are active.

It did however make a few interesting flybys on it’s way out to the edge of the solar system. In the first thirteen months of the probe, diagnostics and instrument checkouts were conducted along with minor course corrections, by April 7th, it’d passed Mars, Mars is a topic for another article though! One big stop on the tour, and I mean big, was the fly by of Jupiter on February 28th, 2007.

I’m sure most of us space geeks have a good idea what Jupiter looks like but the instruments on-board New Horizons in combination with NASA’s Chandra and Hubble telescope were able to give is this view of Jupiter. 

New Horizons took an odd path around Jupiter which ties into the unusual view of the gas giant above, said picture displaying Jupiter’s powerful X-Ray auroras which are believed to be the result of sulfur and oxygen ions interacting in the powerful magnetic field. These emissions along with a lot of other particles, gas, dust and magnetic fields are blown away by the Solar Wind. NASA want to have a better understanding of this system by flying the probe through Jupiter’s trail. You can of course find out much more about this part of the mission by checking out NASA’s website. https://www.nasa.gov/

The next 8 years of the mission were simply an interplanetary journey, New Horizons entered it’s sleep mode at this point, only waking up annually for course corrections and diagnostics. 

Here we can see a brief overview of the instruments New Horizons has on board, They’re all very precise instruments that need to be checked on and looked after, if something goes wrong in space, you can’t just get up there with a tool kit and fix it but if you catch it early enough, you can remotely repair it or work around it.

Now, the part you’ve all been waiting for, the big reveal, Pluto itself is the next stop. I won’t go into all the detail just yet, here, browse pictures first.  https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html

When you’re done looking, we’ll try to understand what you’re looking at. That in itself isn’t easy as the data connection between here and Pluto suffers some terrible latency, in fact if you could connect your PC to it, the latency would report at 1.98e+7ms depending on where Pluto is in it’s orbit, (Anywhere from between 6.76 and 2.66 million miles) you can extrapolate that number if you want, it’s about 5.5 hours. This coupled with the fact that New Horizons isn’t a huge, powerful transmitter means that the data comes to us rather slowly.

Some features of the tiny planet where more surprising than others, for example,

This picture from the probe shows the water ice present on the surface, it turns out that water can be found in some pretty surprising places in the form of ice, everywhere from inside the craters of Mercury to the frozen outer world of Pluto.

Here we see a processed image of Pluto’s atmosphere. Pluto’s atmosphere is roughly 90% nitrogen and 10% complex molecules such as Methane, Don’t get too excited though, some of those complex molecules could be found on life giving worlds such as our own, but on Pluto, they’re more likely the result of Radiation forcing new molecules to be created from the surface. As an interesting note, our atmosphere here on earth is 80% Nitrogen, of course we have other wonderful things such as Oxygen and Water!

Shapes and features of the dwarf planets surface are being mapped and nicknamed, such as Pluto’s broken heart, it was so sad to be kicked out of the big planets club.

My personal recommendations to learn more about this mission are to check out this series of videos http://tinyurl.com/h8yqkq3 as well as a few presentations on Youtube by NASA on their discoveries.

The information and images in this article can all be found on their website https://www.nasa.gov – Some information was also found on  http://discovermagazine.com/tags/?tag=pluto and for information on NASA’s media usage please visit http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines 

Article by Katelyn Bailey