So as we get closer, we're going to see- actually, we're going to get close to the spacecraft. And I'm going to turn on another little trail. And I'm going to turn- oh, barycentric trail, and turn that off. So I just want to turn off this trail outward that we have. So as I get here and we close in just a little bit, what I'm going to do is just slow up as we get closer. And it's also- I thought some of you might appreciate, just today, to get our heads out of the news a little bit- 3 billion miles away, on average, to get out to Pluto. And Pluto takes 248 years to make one orbit. ![]() Its orbit is inclined about 17 degrees so the rest of the planets line up in a nice plane. And as we get out, we can also see the trails of the outer planet orbits.Īnd I just thought, let me move around to just show you why Pluto is different. And so we're going to zoom now quickly out and look at that nine and a half year journey. But let me just target our spacecraft, New Horizons. I have to fly and drive at the same time here, which can be difficult. On my first scientific meeting when I was 17, I ended up having dinner with Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto when he was 24. Pluto is of personal importance to me, in a certain way. And the payload, which we'll see in a second, was small. And so from the Cape, we used the large Delta rocket. Going past Jupiter, it picked up 9,000 miles per hour. And you can see, I'm showing you that it does a little, tiny, barely perceptible- when it moved past Jupiter- now, this is actually- the planets are set for the encounter day, which we're about to go see, out to Pluto.īut you can see that the line has a little bend at Jupiter. And so we're going to look at this trajectory. And so launched in the late '70s, Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989.īut what we left off was, basically, what was then considered the ninth planet, or Pluto. And then Voyager 2 went out to Uranus and Neptune. So when they got to Jupiter, they got an assist to get on to Saturn. It arrived, famously, on July 14 of 2015.īut how do you get to Pluto fast? The Voyager missions that we launched in the late '70s used gravitational assist to actually speed up the spacecraft to go from planet to planet. And we see the trajectory- the very fast trajectory- of the New Horizons' mission, which launched, as I said, January 19 of 2006. What I'm going to do is move out from the inner solar system. And we also have some of our team on board in the chat so that- if you're interested. So if you're interested in OpenSpace, you can download it for free from. ![]() It took nine and a half years to get to Pluto. And so we, however, launched to Pluto in the year of 2006. And so Pluto is linked to the birth of this software. And this is a NASA-supported- in other words, your tax dollars at work- project.Īnd we were funded in the same year that we flew past Pluto in 2015. We're going to be doing this today, as we've been doing with these astronomy online programs, using OpenSpace. Carter, I think we're just about ready to take this flight.ĮMMART: Well, thanks, Jackie. I am going to be taking questions, giving the questions to Carter, helping moderate the chat. ![]() So Carter Emmart, who is a good friend of mine and also the head of- the director of visualizations at the Hayden Planetarium, the American Museum of Natural History. And we're going to talk about the kinds of detailed studies that have been going on in this object in recent years since we've had this mission that's flown right by it. We're going to look in what's in the air. And Carter loves talking about this world and is going to take us through an amazing tour of it.Īnd one of the things that we're going to be setting up for you is we're going to go there. And to set this up- people are probably- emotions are probably rising up right now because Pluto is a world that gets people emotionally invested. Before I intro Carter- hello, Carter-ĬARTER EMMART (Director of Astrovisualization): Hey, Jackie.įAHERTY: -I wanted to say one thing about the program that we're doing today. JACKIE FAHERTY (Senior Scientist, Department of Astrophysics): So let's bring Carter in over here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |