DOCSLIB.ORG

The Year of Pluto - 06-18-2015 by Kushal Bhuyan - Gonit Sora

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Year of Pluto - 06-18-2015 by Kushal Bhuyan - Gonit Sora 2015: The Year of Pluto - 06-18-2015 by Kushal Bhuyan - Gonit Sora - http://gonitsora.com 2015: The Year of Pluto by Kushal Bhuyan - Thursday, June 18, 2015 http://gonitsora.com/2015-the-year-of-pluto/ Kushal Bhuyan Clyde William Tombaugh On 13th March, 1930, the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona had something new for the scientific community, a new planet beyond Neptune. A ninth member of our Solar System was discovered by a 23 year old man named Clyde Tombaugh. The search for an extra planet beyond Neptune was started with Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian who had founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894. He was sure that there is another planet beyond Uranus and Neptune by analysing the perturbations in the orbits of both the planets. He started an extensive project for finding this new planet that he named as Planet X. From 1909 to 1916 until his death, Lowell searched for the probable planet, but without any success. The search for the Planet X resumed in 1929 with Clyde Tombaugh, then a graduate and new to Lowell Observatory. After a year of painstaking work, Tombaugh found something amazing in the January of 1930. After the first observation, several other observations are made to confirm the discovery of a new planet. And on March 13, 1930, they announced the discovery of the ninth planet of our solar system. The newly discovered planet was soon named as Pluto, after the god of the underworld by an 11 year old girl named Venetia Burney. As the time passed, astronomers slowly started to question about the status of planets in case of Pluto. After the discovery of Charon, the moon of Pluto, which is half the size of Pluto, the planet status of Pluto was in danger. Finally in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially created a definition of planet and Pluto wasn't able to satisfy all the criterion. So Pluto lost it's planet status to belong to a new family called Dwarf Planets. Image Source: Shutterstock Pluto is primarily made of rock and ice. It's average distance from Sun is 39.264 AU and has an orbital period of 248 years. It's been 85 years since the first discovery of Pluto, but we don't know much about the planet yet. And no space mission was undertaken to go beyond Neptune, until the dawn of this century. In 2001, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), approved the first flyby mission to Pluto, called New Horizons. The New Horizons mission is the brainchild of Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute, who is also the principal investigator of the mission. After several delays, New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, from Cape Canaveral. It set the record for the highest launch speed of a human-made object from Earth, with an Earth-relative speed of about 16.26 kilometres per second. On February 28, 2007, New Horizons made its closest approach to Jupiter. The Jupiter flyby gave gravity assist to New Horizons by increasing its speed by 4km/s. Astronomers took this opportunity to check the scientific capabilities of New Horizon. Most of the later 1 / 2 2015: The Year of Pluto - 06-18-2015 by Kushal Bhuyan - Gonit Sora - http://gonitsora.com journey was in hibernation mode to preserve on-board systems, except for brief annual checkouts. On December 6, 2014, New Horizons was brought back on-line for the encounter, and instrument check-out began. On January 15, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft began its approach phase to Pluto, which will result in the first flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. This makes 2015, the year of Pluto. Alan Stern The New Horizons space-probe is like a grand piano in size and a satellite dish is glued to it. It is powered by a cylindrical radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). The RTG contains 10.9 kg (24 lb) of plutonium-238 oxide pellets. Among many instruments, New Horizons carries instruments like LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager), SWAP (Solar Wind At Pluto), PEPSSI, Ralph, Alice and SDC (Student Dust Counter), REX(Radio Science Experiment) etc. The primary objectives of New Horizons is to characterize the global geology and morphology of Pluto and Charon and map chemical compositions of Pluto and Charon surfaces. As the New Horizons approaches Pluto, we will have our first high resolution photographs of the dwarf planet. After passing Pluto, New Horizons will continue its mission and will try to study some of the suitable Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). New Horizons will soon follow the path of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to go beyond our solar system to study the outermost regions of our solar system. The New Horizons mission is not only a space mission but it also marked the human triumph of achieving major goals towards the understanding of our solar system. Once a mere dot in the sky will open for us a whole new window of an unknown world which has been fascinating humans from centuries. NASA has recently broadcast a documentary about the New Horizons mission named “2015: the year of Pluto” describing the decade long process of reaching Pluto. We also hope that The New Horizons mission will open a new window to our understanding of the cosmos and will take us one step closer to becoming a species which hold the power to explore The Universe. _______________________________________________ PDF generated from http://gonitsora.com/2015-the-year-of-pluto/. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 2 / 2 Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • New Horizons: Reconnaissance of the Pluto-Charon System and The
    C.T. Russell Editor New Horizons Reconnaissance of the Pluto-Charon System and the Kuiper Belt Previously published in Space Science Reviews Volume 140, Issues 1–4, 2008 C.T. Russell Institute of Geophysics & Planetary Physics University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA Cover illustration: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was launched on 2006 January 19, received a grav- ity assist during a close approach to Jupiter on 2007 February 28, and is now headed for a flyby with closest approach 12,500 km from the center of Pluto on 2015 July 14. This artist’s depiction shows the spacecraft shortly after passing above Pluto’s highly variegated surface, which may have black-streaked surface deposits produced from cryogenic geyser activity, and just before passing into Pluto’s shadow when solar and earth occultation experiments will probe Pluto’s tenuous, and possibly hazy, atmosphere. Sunlit crescents of Pluto’s moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra are visible in the background. After flying through the Pluto system, the New Horizons spacecraft could be re-targeted towards other Kuiper Belt Objects in an extended mission phase. This image is based on an original painting by Dan Durda. © Dan Durda 2001 All rights reserved. Back cover illustration: The New Horizons spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas 551 rocket from the NASA Kennedy Space Center on 2008 January 19 at 19:00 UT. Library of Congress Control Number: 2008944238 DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-89518-5 ISBN-978-0-387-89517-8 e-ISBN-978-0-387-89518-5 Printed on acid-free paper.
    [Show full text]
  • Measurements of the Interplanetary Dust Population by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter on the New Horizons Mission Andrew R
    41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2010) 1219.pdf Measurements of the Interplanetary Dust Population by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter on the New Horizons Mission Andrew R. Poppe1,2, David James1, Brian Jacobsmeyer1,2, and Mihaly Hor´anyi1,2, 1Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, CO, and 2Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, ([email protected]) Introduction: The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (SDC) on the New Horizons mission is an in- strument designed to measure the spatial density of in- terplanetary dust particles with mass, m > 10−12 g, on a radial profile throughout the solar system [1]. The instrument consists of fourteen permanently-polarized polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) detectors that register a charge when impacted by a hypervelocity(v> 1 km/sec) dust particle. PVDF-style dust detectors have previously flown on the Vega 1 and 2 [2] and Cassini spacecraft [3]. The instrument has a total surface area of 0.11 m2, a one- second time resolution and a factor of two in mass reso- lution. When impacted by a hypervelocity dust particle, the instrument records the time, charge, threshold and detector number. SDC is part of the Education and Pub- lic Outreach program of New Horizons, and as such, was designed, tested, integrated and is now operated solely by students. New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006 and encountered Jupiter on February 28, 2007. Prior to the Jupiter encounter, SDC took measurements in two main Figure 1: The New Horizons flight path up to January 1, 2010. periods of the inner solar system: 2.66-3.55 A.U.
    [Show full text]
  • Anticipated Scientific Investigations at the Pluto System
    Space Sci Rev (2008) 140: 93–127 DOI 10.1007/s11214-008-9462-9 New Horizons: Anticipated Scientific Investigations at the Pluto System Leslie A. Young · S. Alan Stern · Harold A. Weaver · Fran Bagenal · Richard P. Binzel · Bonnie Buratti · Andrew F. Cheng · Dale Cruikshank · G. Randall Gladstone · William M. Grundy · David P. Hinson · Mihaly Horanyi · Donald E. Jennings · Ivan R. Linscott · David J. McComas · William B. McKinnon · Ralph McNutt · Jeffery M. Moore · Scott Murchie · Catherine B. Olkin · Carolyn C. Porco · Harold Reitsema · Dennis C. Reuter · John R. Spencer · David C. Slater · Darrell Strobel · Michael E. Summers · G. Leonard Tyler Received: 5 January 2007 / Accepted: 28 October 2008 / Published online: 3 December 2008 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 L.A. Young () · S.A. Stern · C.B. Olkin · J.R. Spencer Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] H.A. Weaver · A.F. Cheng · R. McNutt · S. Murchie Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab., Laurel, MD, USA F. Bagenal · M. Horanyi University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA R.P. Binzel Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA B. Buratti Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA D. Cruikshank · J.M. Moore NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA G.R. Gladstone · D.J. McComas · D.C. Slater Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, USA W.M. Grundy Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, AZ, USA D.P. Hinson · I.R. Linscott · G.L. Tyler Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA D.E. Jennings · D.C. Reuter NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA 94 L.A. Young et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Pluto-Bound CU Instrument Renamed for Girl Who Named Ninth Planet in 1930 30 June 2006
    Pluto-Bound CU Instrument Renamed For Girl Who Named Ninth Planet In 1930 30 June 2006 The University of Colorado at Boulder student-built Research Associate Mihaly Horanyi, principal science instrument on NASA's New Horizons investigator for the student instrument. The CU- mission to Pluto has been renamed to honor Boulder team should be able to infer the population another famous student -- the 11-year-old girl who of comets and other distant colliding bodies that are named the ninth planet more than 75 years ago. too small to detect with telescopes, he said. For the rest of the New Horizons spacecraft's The dust counter also could be used to search for voyage to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond, the dust in the Pluto system, said Horanyi, a CU- Student Dust Counter -- the first science Boulder professor of physics. Such dust might be instrument on a NASA planetary mission to be generated by collisions of tiny impactors on Pluto designed, built and operated by students -- will be and its moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra. known as the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, or "Venetia," for short. The new name The device combines an 18-by-12-inch detector honors Venetia Burney Phair, now 87 and living in mounted on the outside of the spacecraft with an Epsom, England, who offered the name "Pluto" for electronics box inside the craft that determines the the newly discovered ninth planet in 1930. mass and speed of the particles that hit the detector, he said. Because no dust detector has "It's fitting that we name an instrument built by ever flown beyond 18 astronomical units from the students after Mrs.
    [Show full text]
  • The Plutoed Planet 2 Read Each Source Below
    Unit The Plutoed Planet 2 Read each source below . Then complete the activities on pages 10–11 . Source 1 Tri-City Tribune May 2, 1930 Child Names Planet Pluto The astronomers of Lowell Observatory have March 24, a vote was held at Lowell Observa- voted, and it is official: our solar system’s new- tory to determine the planet’s name. In addi- est planet will be named Pluto. This name was tion to Pluto, the names Minerva and Cronus first suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year- were also on the ballot. Yesterday, the results old schoolgirl from Oxford, England. A fan of of the vote were announced, and they were mythology, Ms. Burney believed that the unanimous. Every member chose Pluto for planet should be named after Pluto, the Roman the planet’s name. god of the cold, dark underworld. Pluto now joins an exclusive club, as it Pluto’s journey from discovery to named becomes one of only nine planets in our solar planet has been quick. It was first observed system. Of these, Pluto is the farthest from on February 18 of this year by Clyde Tom- the Sun. Astronomers believe that it is the baugh at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. On coldest and smallest of the nine. Source 2 Tri-City Tribune September 14, 2006 Pluto Ousted! Pluto has always been the little planet that astronomers, while others believe Pluto should was a little different than all the others. Yes- have been stripped of its planet status long ago. terday, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced that Pluto will no longer be In 1930, Pluto was named the ninth planet in considered a planet.
    [Show full text]
  • Journey to the Edge of the Solar System
    Home / Space/ Special Reports Journey to the edge of the solar system History of a space discovery The existence of a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune had been predicted since the 1840s. Astronomers of the time, in fact, thought there was another large planet as yet unknown, situated on the edge of the Solar System, responsible for the disturbances and changes to the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Complex mathematical calculations based on the known mass of Neptune showed, in fact, that its orbit, as well as that of nearby Uranus, did not perfectly correspond to the predictions on the motion of bodies in the Solar System. The search for the ninth planet started seriously in the twentieth century. Percival Lowell, founder astronomer (1894) and director of the Observatory in Flagstaff (Lowell Observatory), Arizona, dedicated the last eight years of his life to the search for Planet X, a phrase used to indicate a planet beyond Neptune. Lowell died in 1916, without being able to prove the existence of the missing planet. We had to wait another 14 years and more precisely 18 February 1930 to demonstrate the existence of Planet X. On that day, the twenty four year old Clyde Tombaugh was intent on observing celestial bodies with a blink comparator, an instrument that allows images of the sky obtained at different times to be compared. Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas farmer with a great passion for astronomy, while never having carried out any formal studies on the subject, had got a job at the Lowell Observatory, thanks to drawings of Mars and Jupiter, which he had made using a telescope he had built with pieces of old farm machinery.
    [Show full text]
  • THE GIRL WHO NAMED PLUTO: the Story of Venetia Burney by Alice B
    THE GIRL WHO NAMED PLUTO: The Story of Venetia Burney By Alice B. McGinty Illustrated by Elizabeth Haidle When Venetia Burney's grandfather reads aloud from the newspaper about a new discovery--a "ninth major planet" that has yet to be named--her eleven-year-old mind starts whirring. She is studying the planets in school and loves Roman mythology. "It might be called Pluto," she says, thinking of the dark underworld. Grandfather loves the idea and contacts his friend at London's Royal Astronomical Society, who writes to scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Massachusetts, where Pluto was discovered. After a vote, the scientists agree unanimously: Pluto is the perfect name for the dark, cold planet. Available May 2019, The Girl Who Named Pluto is an empowering, inspiring, and accessible nonfiction picture book perfect for all children—particularly girls—who have ever dreamed of becoming a scientist. Already an accomplished author, Alice McGinty is the award-winning author of over forty books for children, including Darwin, an Orbis Pictus Honor Book and one of Booklist’s Top 10 Biographies for Youth. It received three starred reviews and was called “exquisite and enlightening” by Kirkus Reviews. Her most recent picture book, Rabbi Benjamin’s Buttons, was named a Sydney Taylor Notable Book. For The Girl Who Named Pluto, she is joined by Elizabeth Haidle, who serves as the creative director of and regular contributor to Illustoria magazine, as well as a collaborator at Mascot Press, an independent comics press. She has illustrated a graphic novel, I, Parrot, written by Deb Olin Unferth, and has several nonfiction comics series in the works.
    [Show full text]
  • New Horizons: First Scientific Results
    New Horizons: First Scientific Results Bonnie J. Buratti (For the New Horizons Team, Alan Stern, P.I.) Principal Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech Discovery of Pluto (1930) Percival Lowell (1855-1916) Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997) Discovery of Pluto’s main moon (1978) The discovery photograph (Pluto + Charon; Charon Is the blob) Christy & Harrington Hubble: July 2012 Styx Kerberos The origin of Charon? The clearest map of Pluto prior to New Horizons (Buie et al., 2010) The Third Zone Pluto’s orbit Neptune’s orbit Triton (Neptune moon) What we expected to see (What we didn’t see) New Horizons Finally, a mission to complete the inventory New Horizons: Mission Objectives • Map surface composition of Pluto & Charon • Characterize geology and morphology of Pluto, Charon & new satellites • Characterize the atmosphere of Pluto and its evolution • Search for an atmosphere around Charon • Map temperatures on Pluto & Charon • Search for rings and additional satellites around Pluto • PLUS... conduct similar investigations of one or more Kuiper Belt Objects New Horizons: Basics Ralph: Visible and IR spectrometer: composition and temperature of surface of Pluto, Charon, and new moons Alice: Ultraviolet spectrometer: atmospheric detection and structure LORRI: Camera to study geology; look for moons and rings REX: Radio science experiment: atmospheric temperature and composition SWAP: Solar wind studies PEPPSI: Energetic particle detector SDC: Student dust counter http://pluto.jhuapl.edu Mission profile Volatile transport The solid lines are no frost transport; the data show sublimation in the bright regions in the past few decades. Leisa spectrometer first results CO Colors of Pluto and Charon Nix and Hydra 42X36 km 55X40 km The magnetosphere of Pluto: It has a tail! Young people (postdocs especially) and women powered the New Horizons project Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter Conclusions and future work • Pluto has a complex geologic history, with evidence for seasonal volatile transport and active processes since its formation.
    [Show full text]
  • Mission Factsheet
    INSERT FLAGSHIP/BUSINESS UNIT NAME Mission Factsheet New Horizons, Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex and Pluto New Horizons New Horizons is the first ever mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on the 19th January 2006 and is scheduled to make the closest approach on Tuesday 14th July at 9:49:57 pm AEST. New Horizons will have travelled 5.3 billion kilometres to reach Pluto. New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth. New Horizons has flown the furthest into space just to start its main mission. The closest New Horizons will pass above Pluto’s surface is approximately 12,500 kilometres. New Horizons will only be in range of Pluto for 5 hrs as it flies past and then heads off into deep space. The New Horizons Spacecraft’s primary structure is 0.7 m tall, 2.1 m long and 2.7 m at its widest. It has a 2.1-m diameter antenna dish that is attached to the top deck; the spacecraft measures 2.2 m tall from the payload attachment fitting on the bottom deck to the top of the dish antenna stack. The probe is powered by plutonium-238, an element named after Pluto. New Horizons required a gravity slingshot from Jupiter in 2007 to gain enough speed to get to Pluto. There are six scientific instruments mounted to New Horizons that will collect a range of information including imaging spectrometers, particle detection instruments and a passive radiometer. Their names are Alice, LORRI, Ralph, PEPSSI, SWAP and Rex.
    [Show full text]
  • New Horizons at Pluto Pluto at Last After a 9½-Year Flight, NASA’S New Horizons Spacecraft Is Making a Long-Awaited Visit to Pluto and Its Moons
    New Horizons at Pluto Pluto at Last After a 9½-year flight, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is making a long-awaited visit to Pluto and its moons. Emily Lakdawalla Beyond any planet that’s ever been its denizens. The spacecraft follows a trail blazed by four explored before lies the frozen “Third others — twin pairs of Pioneers and Voyagers — that are Zone” of the solar system: the Kuiper well on their way to escaping our solar system entirely. Belt. It’s dark, cold, and sluggish, a place so remote that Yet New Horizons is “less” in every way than its prede- its small, icy inhabitants take hundreds of years to com- cessors: a smaller vehicle, smaller data volume, smaller plete a single orbit of the distant, dim Sun. We’ve only instrument package, and a price tag only 40% that of the seen a handful of Kuiper Belt objects from Earth — and Voyager mission. none of those as anything more than vague smudges. Nor will it be the first craft to study a dwarf planet. But after nearly a decade of interplanetary travel, NASA’s That distinction goes to Dawn, which started orbiting New Horizons spacecraft is about to change the status asteroid 1 Ceres in March and has settled in for a year- quo. Now we’re about to see, up close, the region’s most long mission there (S&T: Apr. 2015, p. 20). famous member: Pluto. For New Horizons, orbiting Pluto will be impossible New Horizons is not the first spacecraft to traverse — like the Pioneers and Voyagers, New Horizons is a this region of space, but it will be the first to study any of flyby mission.
    [Show full text]
  • New Frontier
    1 New Frontier ‘‘Ever since celestial mechanics in the skillful hands of Leverrier and Adams led to the world-amazed discovery of Neptune, a belief has existed begotten of that success that still other planets lay beyond, only waiting to be found.’’ – Percival Lowell, 1915 A Planet Hunt The faint starry image jumped a little – very little, in fact. But the heart of young Clyde Tombaugh, who saw it twitch late that Tuesday afternoon in February of 1930, jumped a good bit more. Tombaugh had been hired by Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona, about a year before. His job: to take up the reins of long-dead Percival Low- ell’s quest for that romantic denizen of the deep outer solar system: Planet X. Now, only months into the search, 24-year-old Tombaugh had found it. Who was this cherubic planet finder? He was a Midwestern Amer- ican, born in Streator, Illinois, in February of 1906, the eldest of the six children his parents Muron and Adella produced. Clyde had become interested in astronomy early in his childhood. This interest was fanned when he was still a boy by the loan of a 3- inch (7-centimeter) diameter telescope from his uncle Lee. Just after Clyde reached age 16, in mid-1922, his parents moved the family to a rented wheat and corn farm in Burdett, Kansas. In high school there, Clyde played track and field, “dabbled in Latin,” and played football with his friends on weekend afternoons. His passion, however, was astronomy, and his classmates knew it. In fact, his fellow Burdett High School seniors of 1925 wrote in their yearbook that Clyde had his head “in the stars.” Too poor to afford college, he took the job at Lowell Observatory equipped with little besides a high school education, and a fire inside himself to become a professional astronomer.
    [Show full text]
  • The Girl Who Named Pluto
    THE GIRL WHO NAMED PLUTO Alice B. McGinty Elizabeth Haidle rhcbooks.com THE GIRL WHO NAMED ACTIVITIES Walking the Solar System Name a Celestial Body The book opens with Venetia’s class taking a walk After doing the Many Moons exercise, have to map out part of the solar system. Discuss how students imagine that they can enter a NASA the teacher and students figured out the number contest to name a newly discovered celestial body of paces needed. Then figure out how many more such as a planet or moon. As a class, discuss the would be needed for Uranus and Neptune. As a traditional sources of such names, as well as other PLUTO class, duplicate the walk using the same pacing possible sources. Keep in mind that NASA will want CLASSROOM ACTIVITY GUIDE and the same or similar objects. If possible, take a name that meets public approval! Using the Formal the walk in a place where the class can also mark Letter Graphic Organizer, each student should write About the Book Uranus and Neptune. Then discuss the difference a letter to NASA about their choice, its origin, and When Venetia Burney’s grandfather reads aloud from the between reading about the relative distances why they think the name is a good one. Post the newspaper about a new discovery—a “ninth major planet” that has between planets and experiencing them in a walk. letters on a bulletin board and have the class vote yet to be named—her eleven-year-old mind starts whirring. She for the name they like best.
    [Show full text]