NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zooms in on Pluto

January 27, 2015 - Pluto, get ready for your close-up.

After traveling nine years across more than 3 billion miles of space, a spacecraft the size of a grand piano is about to give humanity its first high-resolution view of the dwarf planet that's about two-thirds the size of our moon.

Nobody knows what the rendezvous will reveal. Pluto's icy surface may resemble an extreme version of Antarctica, with snow-capped mountains, steep crevasses and towering ice cliffs. The planet could be surrounded by rings of tiny ice particles, like its giant neighbor Neptune. There may even be evidence that an ancient ocean once sloshed beneath the frozen crust of its largest moon, Charon.

When it comes to Pluto, nothing is certain.

"Our knowledge of Pluto is quite meager," said planetary scientist Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the NASA mission known as New Horizons. "It is very much like our knowledge of Mars was before our first mission there 50 years ago."

New Horizons is poised to change all that. Sunday, the spacecraft's long-range cameras will begin snapping pictures of Pluto and its moons against a backdrop of stars. New Horizons has been taking detailed measurements of the dust and charged particles in the dwarf planet's environment since mid-January.

More data will be collected during the months leading up to the mission's big moment this summer: a close approach on July 14 that will take the spacecraft just 7,700 miles from Pluto's surface.

From that distance, New Horizons will be able to determine what the dwarf planet is made of, create temperature maps of its multi-colored surface, and look for auroras in its thin atmosphere. Scientists and the public will see the first high-definition images this summer.

Until now, the best pictures astronomers have managed to get consist of a few hazy pixels that were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope more than a decade ago. The resolution is so poor that if you looked at a comparable image of Earth, you wouldn't be able to distinguish the continents from the seas.

The instruments on New Horizons will take images so detailed that if they were pictures of Los Angeles, they would show individual runways at Los Angeles International Airport, said Stern, who is based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

"What I'm most looking forward to is taking this point of light and transforming it into a planet," he said.

The existence of a planet beyond Neptune was first hypothesized in the early 20th century after scientists noticed what they thought were disturbances in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Those wobbles turned out to be measurement errors, but decades of searching for the elusive "Planet X" led astronomers to Pluto in 1930.

Despite its great distance and diminutive size, scientists have been able to glean a remarkable amount of information from the anemic data gathered so far. By watching Pluto's movements across the night sky, they deduced that it takes 248 Earth years to make one trip around the sun. Because Pluto's brightness oscillates in a regular pattern, they think it makes a complete rotation on its axis every 6.4 Earth days.

Astronomers also noted that Pluto ventures far above and below the paths of the major planets in our night sky, leading them to conclude that its orbital plane has a distinctive tilt.

Close observations have revealed that Pluto has at least five moons — the biggest being Charon, which is about the size of Texas.

Sources and more information:

• It Looks Like These Are All the Large Kuiper Belt Objects We'll Ever Find

• Nasa spacecraft in range for Pluto's first close up images

• Trans-Neptunian Objects

• Our Solar System May Have Two Undiscovered Planets

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