New Horizons: One Billion Miles From Pluto 135
astroengine writes "On Feb. 10, NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons probe entered the homestretch of its mission. When you are sprinting across the solar system, 'homestretch' is the final 1 billion miles of your journey. That sounds like quite a long stretch! But the half-ton spacecraft has already logged 2 billion miles since its launch in early 2006. That's twice the distance between Earth and Saturn. Though the icy dwarf planet is still three years away from its close encounter, mission scientists call this the Late Cruise phase of the flight."
Detailed location data (Score:5, Informative)
A page showing New Horizons' location relative to the planets is here [jhuapl.edu]. Detailed ephemeris and other data on the probe can be obtained from NASA's HORIZONS [nasa.gov] system -- click on Target body "[change]", then enter "-98" in the search box.
Just some things (Score:5, Informative)
Already, NH has prompted much more thorough scrutiny of Pluto, resulting in the discovery of a new (fourth) moon;
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/20jul_p4/ [nasa.gov]
And hey, the program is trying to select a member of the Kuiper Belt to visit beyond Pluto, and they're crowdsourcing the search;
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-06/22/crowd-source-new-horizons-next-destination [wired.co.uk]
Also, there's a New Horizons app in the iPhone App store (don't know if there's an Android version).
Re:Astronomical distances and poetry (Score:5, Informative)
One of the main things I try to put across to people when I talk about space, is just how big it is. Sometimes people can't get their head around the numbers, which is quite understandable seeing as we typically don't have much experience dealing with these kind of measurements, so if I have the chance I will point them to the following links containing fantastic visualisations of such scales. They cover the very big and the very small equally well I think, and are simple and engaging enough for kids to follow too.
Powers of Ten [powersof10.com] - very interesting short video commissioned by IBM back in 1968.
The Scale of The Universe [htwins.net] - interactive flash applet that allows you to zoom in and out of the universe (an updated version of one done a year or two back by the same authors).
Relative size of stars and planets [rense.com] - I have no idea who originally made this set of images but they have propogated around the web over the years and this just happens to be first link to it I found in Google results.
If there's one thing in the second and third links that I think will surprise a lot of people, it's how insanely large the biggest stars are compared to our Sun (in diameter, not necessarily in mass).
Re:9.98 AU from Pluto (Score:4, Informative)
The scientifically interesting distance is when it gets close enough to get better data than Hubble did. At perigee, Pluto was at a minimum distance of 28.6 AU from Earth. New Horizons has a much smaller telescope, so it gets 1/20th the resolution as Hubble gets. Therefore it needs to be that much closer, or 1.4 AU away, before it can take better photos. Until then, Earthbound equipment does a better job. That time is around the start of 2015, 6 months before flyby.