DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33524589

Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft has made the first visit to Pluto, speeding past at 14km per second.
Earlier, the space agency released the most detailed picture yet as it hurtled towards the dwarf planet on Tuesday.
The probe was set to grab more pictures and other data as it passed 12,500km from Pluto at 11:50 GMT (12:50 BST).
Controllers got a last health status report, before the robotic craft turned its antenna away from the Earth to concentrate on its target.
We have completed the initial reconnaissance of the Solar System
Alan Stern, New Horizons chief scientist
Only when New Horizons has its trove of images safely in its onboard memory will it call home again.
This is not expected to happen until just after midnight (GMT) into Wednesday.
It means there will be a long, anxious wait for everyone connected with the mission, as they hold out for a signal that will be coming from almost five billion km away.
But scientists already have colour data from the approach and said they might release a new picture later on Tuesday. Images set to be released on Wednesday will be more than 10 times the resolution of those already published.
New Horizons' flyby of 2,370km-wide Pluto is a key moment in the history of space exploration......(Continued at Link)

love science!!

I can't wait for all the captured pictures and images to be released! This stuff is cool I think.

100000000x better than hearing about Obama, flags, racism, gay stuff and whatever else plagues the headlines these days!

Awesome!

I wonder though, why did the probe try to orbit Pluto? Would it have been going too fast?

Well thank you for making sure all those things were mentioned in this thread.

I think you meant "didn't" ... but you're right. The craft is going faster than anything before it. (It got there in 9 years!) I think it would of been way too hard to slow it down enough to orbit.

I have a really dumb question.

How hard is it for NASA to create a flight path that takes the spacecraft each planet? Each planet has a different orbit around the sun, so they aren't lined up, are they? I mean, a lot of people have an image of all of the planets in a line, orbiting the sun, but they all so at different speeds, so couldn't one planet be on the other side of the sun? If you look at the solar system from above, couldn't earth be at 3:oo, Mars at 7:00, Jupiter at noon, and Saturn at 4:30?

thats why its called rocket science.

Someone else probably knows better, but they plan for where the planet WILL be when they pass by, so essentially they are intersecting the planets orbit when the planet is present.

There is a lot of distance between planets, so plenty of time to plan this out with timings.

But as Swish said, they are rocket scientists, and they calculate this stuff down to the most minuscule measure.




Mars at 6 a.m. EDT (1000 UTC) on April 7, 2006 - 78 days after the spacecraft launched.

New Horizons reached a major planetary milestone on February 28, 2007, when it made its closest approach to Jupiter. New Horizons used Jupiter's powerful gravity to boost its speed and adjust its course toward Pluto and the Kuiper Belt;

Orbit of Saturn on June 8, 2008.

New Horizons crossed the orbit of Uranus at approximately 6 p.m. EDT on March 18, 2011

New Horizons crossed the orbit of Neptune at 10:04 p.m. EDT on August 25, 2014

I thought Pluto wasn't a planet any longer but this article calls it a dwarf planet. So in our politically correct world shouldn't they be calling it a little planet, if it's even a planet at all? So do we have 8 or 9 planets in our Solar System?

Mesmerizing.

This is why receivers who run more precise routes are a quarterbacks favorite target!

Nice photoshop. anybody that thinks we actually sent a rocket to Pluto is delusional.

The upper left hand corner of Pluto, IS THAT A FLAG???

LOL...One of the guys I work with was going to Cape Canaveral with his daughters class a few weeks ago. I told him to ask to see the movie lot they shot the moon landing on.

When he came back he said some other guy in their tour group actually asked that, and the tour guide gave him the dirtiest look.

"...anybody that thinks we actually sent a rocket to Pluto is delusional."

Who needs a rocket to Pluto?

THIS REALLY IS THE BROWNS YEAR!!!

WOOF!... WOOF!... WOOF!... "Way to go Brownies...way to go...Way to go Brownies...way to go..."

Auntie Em? Is that you? This sure doen't look like Kansas. ToTo...Toto... come back. "Ohhh... We're off to see the Wizard." "Ground control to Major Tom...". Shrubberies... everywhere shrubberies.

Maybe they meant the Disney character Pluto.

Pluto probably feels like that ex-girlfriend... earth broke up with her and said she wasn't a planet, now we are driving by her house real slow taking pictures.

Pluto Schmuto, I wanted to see Uranus!

Quite difficult, actually. When we launch a spacecraft to go by planets, we don't launch it in a straight line. We actually send the craft into an elliptical path around our planet and use planetary gravity for course and velocity changes.

Play Kerbal Space Program. You'll have a whole new understanding for orbital mechanics.

Either that or take a math course in vectoral calculus.

Good stuff. You guys are Message Board Engineers.

I had trouble with calculus.

I'll pass. Thanks.

Here was my final in that class. A ball is pitched and hit by a bat, where does it land?

They gave information on the speed, angle, and rotation of the ball, the speed, angle, and rotation of the bat, humidity, wind direction and velocity, air temperature, and probably a few other variables.

It landed ..... on the ground.

Pshaw. Give me my degree.

Space exploration is actually a religion, looking for meaning and a purpose.

I love this site.

Had a similar question, but it was extra credit on the final. It was golfing based and the guy hitting the ball was on an incline on the edge of a cliff as if it wouldn't be hard enough already given all the other variables. I wrote that it was a hole-in-one. I was correct, but didn't show my work.

Had a similar question, but it was extra credit on the final. It was golfing based and the guy hitting the ball was on an incline on the edge of a cliff as if it wouldn't be hard enough already given all the other variables. I wrote that it was a hole-in-one. I was correct, but didn't show my work.