New Horizons space probe ready to make history at Pluto

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is approaching near to Pluto and as it zoomz past Pluto new things are coming up, the dwarf planet isn’t quite as dwarfish as the scientist thought in fact, it’s the largest known solar system object beyond Neptune.

• Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) which makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto’s downfall as the “ninth planet” back in 2006 and it was considered no more as a planet
• Eris’ diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles), plus or minus 12 kilometers (7.5 miles )
• New Horizons’ measurements confirmed that Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, is 751 miles (1,208 kilometers) across and that the smaller icy moons Nix and Hydra are 20 and 30 miles (35 and 45 kilometers) wide, respectively.

What is New Horizon ?

• New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched on January 19, 2006, as part of NASA’s New Frontiers program.
• It was Built by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute, with a team led by S. Alan Stern
• The spacecraft was launched to study Pluto, its moons and the Kuiper Belt, performing flybys of the Pluto system and one or more Kuiper Belt Objects

Facts about New Horizon

The New Horizon probe weigh around one thousand pounds and traveling at 31,000 m.p.h. from New Horizon’s position more than 4.88 billion km from Earth, radio signals that travel at the speed of light take nearly four and a half hours to reach the ground.Data will be radioed back to Earth over the next 16 months. New Horizons’ flyby of 2,370 km-wide Pluto is a key moment in the history of space exploration.

Why go to Pluto?

• New Horizon’s core science mission is to map the surfaces of Pluto and Charon, to study Pluto’s atmosphere and to take temperature readings.
• The planets closest to our sun — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are rocky. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are gas giants. But Pluto is different: Even though it is out beyond the gas giants, it has a solid, icy surface.
• Pluto also is small, about the size of the United States, Stern said. Its largest moon, Charon, is about the size of Texas. Pluto also has four smaller moons: Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.