By: Ringo Bones
Despite of the post Cold War austere fiscal environment at
NASA, the recent successes demonstrated by the New Horizons spacecraft
currently taking our clearest snapshots of Pluto so far can be quite inspiring
to anyone interested in astronomy and space exploration as a whole. Given the
spacecraft’s recent accomplishment despite being built on a “relatively” shoestring
budget of 700 million US dollars is no mean feat indeed.
When NASA’s task-masters at Capitol Hill green lit the New
Horizons program back in 2001 and the four year timetable on the construction
of the craft for its scheduled launched at the beginning of 2006 are just one
of the miracles successfully pulled off by the New Horizons spacecraft. If the
funding and launch timetable was delayed to several weeks after the
International Astronomical Union declared that Pluto is no longer a planet, the
“princes” at Capitol Hill would probably had scrapped the funding of the New
Horizons program. In honor of Pluto’s discoverer, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh,
Tombaugh’s ashes was taken onboard as payload on the New Horizons spacecraft so
that he can achieve the closest physically possible of actually visiting Pluto
first hand.
Due to its distance and small size, the world’s astronomical
community have virtually little interest on the planet Pluto that between the
cataloguing of the planet via “old school” astronomical photographic plates by
Clyde Tombaugh in the 1930s and astronomer Carl Lampland in the 1950s, the
actual location of Pluto’s orbit could be in error by as much as 62,000 miles.
It was only after 1990 that the global astronomical community’s orbital data accuracy
on Pluto became on par of that of the planets Uranus and Neptune. It is only
understandably so due to Pluto’s remoteness at over 3 billion miles away from
planet Earth and since Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930, astronomers
here on Earth had only “witnessed” about 1/3 of its almost 250-year orbit
around our Sun.
The recent New Horizons spacecraft’s successful 8,000 mile “close
flyby” would not have happened without the due diligence of one of the New
Horizons program’s co investigator Dr. Marc Buie due to a lack of usefully
accurate data on Pluto’s orbit and actual distance from the Sun. By 2012, the
New Horizon’s team was concerned on the lack of accurate orbital data on the
planet Pluto that Dr. Buie actually did his own legwork at the Lowell
Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in order to reexamine around 1,000 of astronomical
photographic plates of Pluto taken by Clyde Tombaugh and Carl Lampland during
1930 to 1950. The new computational data acquired by Dr. Buie became very
indispensible in programming the New Horizon’s spacecraft’s trajectory so that
when it encounters Pluto by July 2015, it will be within 8,000 miles – as opposed
to 62,000 miles away.
Due to its destination’s remoteness from the Sun where the
ambient strength of sunlight is only 1/1000th found here on Earth, the
use of solar panels is out of the question in the New Horizons spacecraft.
Instead, it uses a plutonium-239 powered thermoelectric reactor similar to that
used in the Voyager spacecraft to power its systems. Due to Pluto’s remoteness,
it took nine and a half years for New Horizons to reach its Pluto flyby despite
travelling 1 million miles a day at 51,000 miles per hour.
