REAL LIFE NEWS: NEW HORIZONS PROBE TO SNAP PLUTO
by Hazed
From Martian rovers we move to the New Horizons spacecraft which is heading for Pluto. It is expected to make its closest approach to Pluto in July, and in preparation it has started to take pictures of it to help determine its position relative to the dwarf planet.
New Horizons has taken nine years to get to its current position, 3 billion miles from Earth. Now it has 124 million miles to go, so the pictures it is taking only show a tiny speck of light – but that’s enough to help make sure the probe is aligned for its fly-by in the summer.
It will keep on snapping images of Pluto as it approaches, explained Mark Holdridge from the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab. “We then perform a number of correction manoeuvres to realign our trajectory with the reference trajectory, thus ensuring we hit our aim point to travel through the Pluto system,” he said.
Initial course corrections should be made in March, to get the probe ready for its encounter with the dwarf planet. It won’t be going into orbit around Pluto but will zoom past, at a distance of roughly 8 miles from the surface.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30954673
