Alice, Ralph, Lorri and Rex
Dec. 6th, 2014 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistNew Horizons is about to wake up!
New Horizons is a NASA mission to Pluto, its moons and even some other Kuiper Belt Objects in the neighborhood that are conveniently located (the Kuiper Belt is a bit like the asteroid belt, out where Pluto is).
As with Cassini, I feel such a strange sense of the time passing: I remember when both were launched thinking about how frustratingly, impossibly futuristic the dates of their eventual arrival seemed to me. Excited about Cassini in 1997, I had no idea what 2004 would be like. New Horizons launched two days before I got married; I think it's safe to say that that feels like a very long time ago!
So much has changed that Pluto was still a planet when New Horizons took off.
Of course, there's no less reason to go there now than there would've been before: I've always been happy with Pluto being a dwarf planet, but I'm still thrilled at this aptly-named mission: even Hubble, which can take beautiful intricate pictures of nebulae and galaxies and suchlike that are billions of light years away, still can only show us pictures of Pluto that are so pixilated it looks like a disco ball.
I'm still learning a lot about New Horizons, like that Pluto's satellites that've been discovered since its launch were given the names Nix and Hydra because they have the same initials as the mission. Also, it'd never really occurred to me that sending this spacecraft as quickly as possible towards Pluto so it'd get there before everybody working on it retired also meant that it would zoom past Pluto pretty quickly! New Horizons is traveling so fast that the actual close-approach part of the encounter happens in an incredibly short period; nearly all of the most important goals for the mission are met in the time from 2.5 hours before to 1 hour after closest approach.
Three and a half hours. After nine years of getting there. Of course, other observations will be going on for many months, but I still think it's incredible that any group of humans can so focus their energy and attention that everything needed to make this happen could be brought together with sufficient precision to make such a thing worthwhile. Like ESA landing a probe on a comet a few weeks ago. It's good for us, every now and then, to remember the far-reaching, forward-thinking organization and detail and ambition we humans are capable of bringing to something that for once doesn't kill or hurt or even make more miserable our fellow humans.
New Horizons is a NASA mission to Pluto, its moons and even some other Kuiper Belt Objects in the neighborhood that are conveniently located (the Kuiper Belt is a bit like the asteroid belt, out where Pluto is).
As with Cassini, I feel such a strange sense of the time passing: I remember when both were launched thinking about how frustratingly, impossibly futuristic the dates of their eventual arrival seemed to me. Excited about Cassini in 1997, I had no idea what 2004 would be like. New Horizons launched two days before I got married; I think it's safe to say that that feels like a very long time ago!
So much has changed that Pluto was still a planet when New Horizons took off.
Of course, there's no less reason to go there now than there would've been before: I've always been happy with Pluto being a dwarf planet, but I'm still thrilled at this aptly-named mission: even Hubble, which can take beautiful intricate pictures of nebulae and galaxies and suchlike that are billions of light years away, still can only show us pictures of Pluto that are so pixilated it looks like a disco ball.
I'm still learning a lot about New Horizons, like that Pluto's satellites that've been discovered since its launch were given the names Nix and Hydra because they have the same initials as the mission. Also, it'd never really occurred to me that sending this spacecraft as quickly as possible towards Pluto so it'd get there before everybody working on it retired also meant that it would zoom past Pluto pretty quickly! New Horizons is traveling so fast that the actual close-approach part of the encounter happens in an incredibly short period; nearly all of the most important goals for the mission are met in the time from 2.5 hours before to 1 hour after closest approach.
Three and a half hours. After nine years of getting there. Of course, other observations will be going on for many months, but I still think it's incredible that any group of humans can so focus their energy and attention that everything needed to make this happen could be brought together with sufficient precision to make such a thing worthwhile. Like ESA landing a probe on a comet a few weeks ago. It's good for us, every now and then, to remember the far-reaching, forward-thinking organization and detail and ambition we humans are capable of bringing to something that for once doesn't kill or hurt or even make more miserable our fellow humans.
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(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-08 04:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-08 07:34 am (UTC)This is one of the most harrowing things -- something I forgot to mention but meant to: There will be long, scary periods during the two weeks around the closest approach where New Horizons will be silent, and all we can do is hope that it will start talking to us again when we expect it to.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-08 08:13 am (UTC)Obviously, we hope that New Horizons doesn't become space debris and instead joins the fraternity of craft performing useful experimentation and imaging long past their original mission date.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-07 11:25 am (UTC)Seriously though, I love this and I love your space posts. What's the significance of your post titles?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-07 11:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-07 11:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-07 12:40 pm (UTC)