Updates NASA New Horizons Mission Updates

[Notebook]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20160831-2

NASA's New Horizons is doing some sightseeing along the way, as the spacecraft speeds toward a New Year's Day 2019 date with an ancient object in the distant region beyond Pluto known as 2014 MU69.

Pluto's Methane Snowcaps on the Edge of Darkness

Cthulhu Regio...

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20160831

 

[Notebook]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20160914-2

New Horizons scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made the first detections of X-rays from Pluto. These observations offer new insight into the space environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar system's outermost regions.
While the New Horizons spacecraft was speeding toward and beyond Pluto, Chandra was aimed several times on the dwarf planet and its moons, gathering data on Pluto that the missions could compare after the flyby. Each time Chandra pointed at Pluto – four times in all, from February 2014 through August 2015 – it detected low-energy X-rays from the small planet.

 

[Notebook]

The next target for NASA's New Horizons mission – which made a historic flight past Pluto in July 2015 –– apparently bears a colorful resemblance to its famous, main destination.
Hubble Space Telescope data suggests that 2014 MU69, a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) about a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, is as red, if not redder, than Pluto. This is the first hint at the surface properties of the far-flung object that New Horizons will survey on Jan. 1, 2019.
Mission scientists are discussing this and other Pluto and Kuiper Belt findings this week at the joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences and European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, California.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20161018

 

[orb]

NASA: New Horizons Returns Last Bits of 2015 Flyby Data to Earth:

Having traveled from the New Horizons spacecraft over 3.4 billion miles, or 5.5 billion kilometers (five hours, eight minutes at light speed), the final item – a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager – arrived at mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25. The downlink came via NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.

{...}

 

[Notebook]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38005104

Pluto may harbour a slushy water ocean beneath its most prominent surface feature, known as the "heart".
This could explain why part of the heart-shaped region - called Sputnik Planitia - is locked in alignment with Pluto's largest moon Charon.
A viscous ocean beneath the icy crust could have acted as a heavy, irregular mass that rolled Pluto over, so that Sputnik Planitia was facing the moon.

 

[Notebook]

December 2, 2016
Scientists Probe Mystery of Pluto's Icy Heart

Was Pluto's frozen heart formed in an ancient impact basin and was it once closer to the north pole? And does the icy heart conceal a subsurface ocean?
Scientists are offering several new scenarios to explain the formation of Pluto's frozen heart-shaped feature, first spotted by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. Researchers have focused on the heart's western lobe, informally named Sputnik Planitia, a deep basin containing three kinds of ices—frozen nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide—and appearing opposite Charon, Pluto's large, tidally locked moon. While many scientists suspect that the western half of Pluto's heart formed within a basin created long ago by the impact of a large Kuiper Belt object onto Pluto, at least one new scenario requires no impact

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20161202

 

[JonnyBGoode]

I'm confused. One article says it's on the side facing Charon, the other one says it's on the opposite side of the planet.

 

[Notebook]

which other article?

N.

 

[JonnyBGoode]

which other article?

N.

These:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38005104

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20161202

 

[Notebook]

Do you mean these two sentences?

BBC

Sputnik Planitia is a circular region in the heart's left "ventricle" and is aligned almost exactly opposite Charon.

jpl

Sputnik Planitia is a circular region in the heart's left "ventricle" and is aligned almost exactly opposite Charon.

Just realised they are the same! Strange howyou don't notice when yu read the different articles...

Probably not the ones you mean, but they are the only ones I can find?

N.

 

[Notebook]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/PI-Perspectives.php?page=piPerspective_12_22_2016

December 22, 2016

Clouds in My Coffee: Exploring Pluto and the Wild Back Yonder!


New Horizons is on its way to a new flyby, where it will study an ancient building block of small planets like Pluto, on New Year's Day 2019.

As 2016 ends, I can't help but point out an interesting symmetry in where the mission has recently been and where we are going. Exactly two years ago we had just taken New Horizons out of cruise hibernation to begin preparations for the Pluto flyby. And exactly two years from now we will be on final approach to our next flyby, which will culminate with a very close approach to a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) called 2014 MU69 – a billion miles farther out than Pluto – on Jan. 1, 2019. Just now, as 2016 ends, we are at the halfway point between those two milestones.

 

[orb]

Universe Today: Here's the highest resolution map of Pluto we'll get from New Horizons

NASA: Pluto Global Color Map

(Click for bigger version)​

 

[Nicholas Kang]

New Horizons Refines Course for Next Flyby

NASA Press Statement:https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-refines-course-for-next-flyby

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI/Steve Gribben

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft completed a short propulsive maneuver Wednesday to refine its track toward a New Year’s Day 2019 flyby past 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) some 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth.

Operating by timed commands stored on its computer, New Horizons fired its thrusters for just 44 seconds, adjusting its velocity by about 44 centimeters per second, or a little less than one mile per hour. It was the first trajectory maneuver since the team conducted a set of four maneuvers in the fall of 2015 that put the spacecraft on a course for its rendezvous with MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019.

“One mile per hour may not sound like much,” said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, “but over the next 23 months, as we approach MU69, that maneuver will add up to an aim point refinement of almost six thousand miles (10,000 kilometers).”

What’s Next for New Horizons? The red line marks the path of the New Horizons toward its next flyby, a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69. The green dot approximates the spacecraft’s current position.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

 

[Notebook]

February 10, 2017
New Horizons Exits Brief Safe Mode, Recovery Operations Continue
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is operating normally after just over 24 hours in a protective "safe mode," the result of a command-loading error that occurred early Thursday. The spacecraft is designed to automatically transition to safe mode under certain anomalous conditions to protect itself from harm. In safe mode, the spacecraft suspends its timeline of activities and keeps its antenna pointed toward Earth to listen for instructions from the Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
"Our rapid recovery was supported by other NASA missions that provided New Horizons with some of their valuable Deep Space Network [DSN] antenna time," said Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at APL. "This is the norm for missions using the DSN – we support one another when challenges arise."
New Horizons is healthy and continues to speed along toward its next target – the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 – while its operations team works to restore it to full operations and resume scientific data collection. Due to the 10.5-hour round trip communications delay that results from operating a spacecraft more than 3.5 billion miles (5.7 billion kilometers) from Earth, the team expects New Horizons to be back on its activities timeline early Sunday, Feb. 12.

N....

 

[Soheil_Esy]

New Horizons Halfway from Pluto to Next Flyby Target


April 3, 2017

Continuing on its path through the outer regions of the solar system, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has now traveled half the distance from Pluto – its storied first target – to 2014 MU69, the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) it will fly past on Jan. 1, 2019. The spacecraft reached that milestone at midnight (UTC) on April 3 – or 8 p.m. ET on April 2 – when it was 486.19 million miles (782.45 million kilometers) beyond Pluto and the same distance from MU69.

“It’s fantastic to have completed half the journey to our next flyby; that flyby will set the record for the most distant world ever explored in the history of civilization,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Later this week – at 21:24 UTC (or 5:24 p.m. ET) on April 7 – New Horizons will also reach the halfway point in time between closest approaches to Pluto, which occurred at 7:48 a.m. ET on July 14, 2015, and MU69, predicted for 2 a.m. ET on New Year’s Day 2019. The nearly five-day difference between the halfway markers of distance and time is due to the gravitational tug of the sun. The spacecraft is actually getting slightly slower as it pulls away from the sun’s gravity, so the spacecraft crosses the midpoint in distance a bit before it passes the midpoint in time.

Ready for a Rest

New Horizons will begin a new period of hibernation later this week. In fact, the spacecraft will be sleeping through the April 7 halfway timing marker to MU69, because mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will have put the spacecraft into hibernation two hours beforehand.

The scheduled 157-day hibernation is well-deserved; New Horizons has been “awake” for almost two and a half years, since Dec. 6, 2014. Since then, in addition to its historic Pluto encounter and 16 subsequent months of relaying the data from that encounter back to Earth, New Horizons has made breakthrough, distant observations of a dozen Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), collected unique data on the dust and charged-particle environment of the Kuiper Belt, and studied the hydrogen gas that permeates the vast space surrounding the sun, called the heliosphere.

“The January 2019 MU69 flyby is the next big event for us, but New Horizons is truly a mission to more broadly explore the Kuiper Belt,” said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from APL, in Laurel, Maryland. “In addition to MU69, we plan to study more than two-dozen other KBOs in the distance and measure the charged particle and dust environment all the way across the Kuiper Belt.”

New Horizons is currently 3.5 billion miles (5.7 billion kilometers) from Earth; at that distance, a radio signal sent from the operations team – and traveling at light speed – needs about five hours and 20 minutes to reach the spacecraft. All spacecraft systems are healthy and operating normally, and the spacecraft is on course for its MU69 flyby.

Follow the voyage at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Where-is-New-Horizons/index.php, and get the latest news and images from the mission on Facebook, Twitter and the NASA and mission team websites.
Last Updated: April 3, 2017


https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-halfway-from-pluto-to-next-flyby-target

Commentary

The U.S. NASA uses obsolete technologies, as data link based on radio waves are limited by that of the speed of light, thus the above 5 hours 20 minutes delay.
China on the contrary demonstrated last year with its quantum communication satellite Micius, the ability to not only secure hack proof communications, but also instantaneous communication (call it post einsteinian physics allowing infinite speed if you want), even at the distance of the Kuiper Belt and beyond.
This is made possible as China has mastered applied quantum entanglement on space platforms.
Conclusion, NASA should seriously consider updating its data link technologies if it wants to expand its space faring radius beyond our solar system in the future!

S☫heil

 

[DaveS]

You do realize that New Horizons is over a decade old and that advanced comm systems didn't exist or was space certified when they designed the spacecraft right?

 

[Notebook]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20170410

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has eased into a long summer's nap, entering a hibernation phase on April 7 that will last until early September.
Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, verified that New Horizons – acting on commands uplinked to its main computer the week before – entered hibernation at 3:32 p.m. EDT. With the spacecraft now about 3.5 billion miles (5.7 billion kilometers) from Earth, the radio signals carrying that word from New Horizons needed just over five hours – traveling at the speed of light – to reach the APL mission operations center through NASA's Deep Space Network.

 

[dbeachy1]

O-F Staff Note: Eleven posts discussing quantum entanglement have been moved to this new thread. Please feel free to continue the discussion there.

 

[Notebook]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/PI-Perspectives.php?page=piPerspective_04_28_2017

Three weeks ago we put our New Horizons spacecraft into hibernation mode, the first time we'd done that since late 2014, before the Pluto flyby. By coincidence, that same day – April 7—was also the exact halfway mark on the calendar between our Pluto and Kuiper Belt object (KBO) flybys!

 

[Ravenous]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/PI-Perspectives.php?page=piPerspective_04_28_2017

Yes, we're going to give 2014 MU69 a real name, rather than just the "license plate" designator it has now. The details of how we'll name it are still being worked out, but NASA announced a few weeks back that it will involve a public naming contest, as we requested.

Oh no, not again! (OK I'm half kidding.)