
NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Pluto Encounter - frankydp
http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons/on-plutos-doorstep-new-horizons-spacecraft-awakens-for-encounter/#.VIPZ6R4Vg4R
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FireRabbit
2015 is shaping up to be a great year. New Horizons visits Pluto and the Dawn
probe visits Ceres. Two dwarf planets in one year, when we've never visited a
single one before.

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InclinedPlane
Don't forget Rosetta continuing operations around comet 47P while it
transitions into being an active comet.

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lovelearning
There are two sentences in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Everything" that
absolutely amazed me when I read them the first time:

"Even at the speed of light (300,000 kilometres per second) it would take
seven hours to get to Pluto. ... On a diagram of the solar system to scale,
with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over
300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant..."

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valevk
The article says there is "a high-resolution telescopic camera" on board. Does
this mean we will get high-resolution pictures of Pluto's surface, like those
we have of Mars?

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FireRabbit
I'd assume so. It has already taken high-resolution photos of some of
Jupiter's moons, when it flew past in 2006-2007.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Jovian_moons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Jovian_moons)

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p4bl0
It really amazes me that we are able to transmit high-res pictures from such
distances.

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TkTech
Within our solar system (which is itty-bitty), there is really no theoretical
limit to what we can send or receive. Bandwith is pretty high on modern
satellites and probes and our only really limiting factor is latency, which
doesn't matter so much when the probes can store data locally and slowly send
it to you over time. NASA is currently experimenting with the LCRD[1] project
for laser-based communications which have a downlink of 622mbps.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Communications_Relay_Demo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Communications_Relay_Demonstration)

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marktangotango
Is there any intention to use New Horizons to test the "Pioneer Anomaly"?
Seems like a good candidate, as its moving in the right direction.

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FeatureRush
Pioneer Anomaly was solved in 2012, once the thermal recoil force is properly
accounted for, no anomalous acceleration remains.

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hga
Well, confirmation with another probe would be nice, and the New Horizons has
an instrument (obviously included before the thermal solution) if NASA so
chooses to perform the experiment. Will no doubt depend in part if they can
find another object to examine beyond Pluto.

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drbitboy
The hibernation mode of New Horizons has the RTG "cylinder" axis perpendicular
to the spin axis, so unless there is asymmetry around the axis of the RTG, I
would not expect to see any thermal recoil force. I guess that means we would
not expect to see any effect, which neither validates nor invalidates the
accepted thermal recoil theory for Pioneer, but it would exclude any "New
Physics" explanations (which the planets do already).

You can read quite a bit of detail about NH in the data sets archived to-date
in the Planetary Data System
[http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/](http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/) specifically
[http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/holdings/](http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/holdings/)
look for data set directory names starting with nh- and subdirectories of
those named catalog/ and document/.

There is also a lot of geometry information available in the SPICE data set
under /[http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/pds/data/nh-j_p_ss-
spice-6...](http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/pds/data/nh-j_p_ss-
spice-6-v1.0/nhsp_1000/) e.g. start at aareadme.htm

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hga
I said that based on a Wikipedia reference to this paper:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.5135](http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.5135)

Which proposed to do testing in late 2007 through 2008, which I gather didn't
happen, no doubt because of the reason you point out.

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kartikkumar
It's always a nervy moment for mission operations to re-establish contact with
a hibernating spacecraft. Much relief and much to look forward to, as the
fastest object in the Solar System speeds towards Pluto. Pluto is a
fascinating system and with the discovery of additional moons over the last
few years, there's clearly a lot to be discovered.

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zackmorris
Wow I just did the math and at this rate it would take New Horizons roughly
20,000 years to travel 1 lightyear. Slingshotting around Jupiter takes longer
to play out than a straight shot obviously, but it puts things in perspective.

