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________________________________________________________________________________ New Horizons Goes to Pluto and Beyond! It will take 9 years to cover the 3.5 billion miles needed to reach Pluto. Taking off on January 19, 2006 at 2:00pm eastern, a July 14, 2015 flyby will be the big day for New Horizon according to current calculations. By 2:50pm today, a data link from space craft New Horizon was confirmed and the mission is a go! While we are in the neighborhood, we will be looking at 2003 UB313 to determine whether it is another planet or just a big rock floating around out there. Pluto wasn't officially a planet until 1930, when Clyde Tombaugh convinced the scientific community that it was. New Horizons will hopefully continue past Pluto and into the Kuiper belt where there are lots of cool rocks, small planets and things to discover. Data from New Horizons will come in compressed form as memory aboard the craft fills and is dumped back to us. I believe I heard monthly compressed data will be received and then uncompressed and cleaned up over several months before it is ready for studies. Also, the Stardust mission was completed today with a perfect speck of comet received and ready for study! See nasa.gov/stardust. About The Author << Back to Gemini Magazine Science << Back to VirtualeScience Blog ________________________________________________________________________________
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