Tomorrow wake automatic interplanetary station New Horizons

Wake up the machine to begin the active phase of its mission - closer to Pluto (remember that Pluto is now considered a planetoid, a dwarf planet) and its satellite Charon. An interesting fact is that the station was sent before Pluto officially ceased to be a planet.

New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, with the greatest of all spacecraft velocity. По According to Wiki , at shut down speed was 16, 26 km / s relative to the Earth. During his many years of traveling machine several times coming out of hibernation to verify that the systems and study the surrounding area (eg, the station "woke up" at the time of the passage near Jupiter). In general, all the time machine to sleep and woke up 18 times. Minimum term "sleep" - 36 days maximum - 202.

Hibernate need a device to save power. Saves only performance monitoring systems and a transmitter that gave a signal to Earth once a week.



Since the launch of the station took place i>

Tomorrow at 11 pm Moscow time machine must wake up and start closer to Pluto. That the device will do next?

Already in January, the station will fly at a distance of 75 million kilometers from the asteroid VNH0004, New Horizons will try to get some information about that object.

Then, in mid-January, will stage in the study of Pluto, with an attempt to commit the nearest object (possibly near the unit will fly any cosmic body). Already in May, the machine can obtain high-quality pictures of Pluto, the resolution of which will be higher than in the photos "Hubble".



Next summer, New Horizons will fly at a distance of about 10 thousand kilometers from the surface of Pluto. This will get the highest quality photos planetoid ever observed. It is expected that during this time the unit will gather Bole 4 gigabytes of information, which will then be transmitted to Earth. By the way, these data will be used to test the hypothesis of the existence of a layer of ice liquid water.

The next stage of research - 2016-2020 year, while New Horizons will pass the information that the device "sees" in the Kuiper belt. Future of the apparatus while not explicitly defined. That is, it is known that New Horizons will explore the Kuiper belt, but how many stations can operate, it is difficult to say. It is expected that New Horizons will last until 2026.

By the way, nothing human is alien astronomers, and the project team sent to New Horizons capsule with a small amount of the ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh. Plus, the device carries a CD with the names of people who participated in the action Send Your Name to Pluto (all those accumulated 434 000 738).

And the results of the station should really open up new horizons, in this sense, the name chosen for the interplanetary station perfectly. We can only wait to have a stamp "surf the Universe" will cease to be a metaphor.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/242512/