The crowd ushered in 2019 at midnight, then cheered, blew party horns and jubilantly waved small U.S. Instead, hundreds of team members and their guests gathered nearby on campus for back-to-back countdowns. With New Horizons on autopilot, Mission Control was empty at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. So they had to wait until late morning before learning whether the spacecraft survived. Scientists wanted New Horizons observing Ultima Thule during the encounter, not phoning home. The mysterious, ancient target nicknamed Ultima Thule is 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth. Confirmation was not expected for hours, though, given the vast distance. Or go get a degree in planetary science and find out for yourself.Flight controllers said everything looked good for New Horizons' flyby of the tiny, icy object at 12:33 a.m. What's that? The last bit of Pluto data New Horizons sent home? "Some composition mapping data from the LEISA infrared mapping spectrometer aboard out Ralph instrument," says Stern. The agency recently sent out research proposals for more scientists to help the original New Horizons team analyze data.Īnd lest you think data analysis is the team's only chore, remember that they are still steering New Horizons towards its next target-a remote object in the Kuiper Belt known as 2014 MU69. "There are people who were born after Voyager who have earned a PhD and work on data from the 1980s," he says. Imagine: A 10-year-old kid inspired by last year's flyby could spend her post-doc solving Plutonian mysteries using New Horizons' data. Completing the job might employ another generation of planetary scientists. Stern says his team has only turned about 80 percent of the New Horizons data into science. That one really nailed it for Stern: It was his equivalent of seeing the Apollo Earthrise picture. The only way to get that image was to be on the far side of the dwarf world, backlit by the sun. "It's the true color image of Pluto's atmosphere, with a blue ring around it," he says. New Horizons took the second image towards the end of its fly by. "After 26 years of working on this, it was just stunning to see what the world really looked like," he says. First was that first, lovely, high resolution downlink from July 14, 2015. While Stern treats every byte of data like his own blood, a few downlinks hold special significance. Plus surprises-like Charon's 600-mile minimum equatorial canyon-from each of Pluto's five satellites. The images showed vast glaciers, mountains made of water ice, plains of frozen nitrogen, atmospheric haze layers, cryogenic volcanoes, and geologic evidence that Pluto has been tectonically active for 4.5 billion years. "New Horizons was just raining data every week for a year and a half," says Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator. Bit by bit, the New Horizons ground team collected the flyby data over 469 days. But New Horizons is 3 billion miles away. You could download (legally, of course) a movie that size in a few minutes. Together, they collected 6.25 gigabytes of data. New Horizons is equipped with seven different instruments-multi-spectral imagers, particle sniffers, dust collectors. New Horizons didn't just deliver a picture of Pluto's gigantic heart: The probe's flyby revealed the dwarf planet as one of the most dynamic and complex worlds in the solar system. Planetary scientists had some ideas about Pluto's atmosphere, geology, and satellite system, well, pixellated works as an analogy for the clarity of those ideas. On October 25, the last few hundred bits of that data finally arrived in one of NASA's deep space radio dishes.įor posterity's sake, take a moment and remember that before the flyby- a mere 15 months ago-the dwarf planet was a pixellated blur. Last summer, as it sped through the Pluto system, the New Horizons spacecraft only had a few hours to pack its memory banks with as much data about the dwarf planetary system as possible.
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