Why NASA's New Horizons probe to Pluto is a big deal: Bob McDonald
1st public images to be released Wednesday afternoon with more to come over next 2 weeks
After 9½ years and 4.7 billion kilometres travelled, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is finally set to fly past Pluto. But the results will come back to Earth with what may feel like the speed of a dripping faucet.
On Tuesday, the spacecraft, launched in January 2006, reaches its closest distance to Pluto, doing a 30-minute flyby to gather information from the difficult-to-see dwarf planet.
At its closest approach, about 12,500 kilometres away from Pluto, New Horizons is expected to produce clear colour images of the icy object. The spacecraft will reach that distance at 7:49 a.m. ET Tuesday as it zooms past Pluto at 49,600 km/h. But because the spacecraft's antenna can only be focused in one direction at a time, it will take full advantage of examining Pluto for 22 hours before sending back reports.
The first expected transmission will be between 8:53 p.m. and 9:09 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and that will only confirm that the craft successfully made it through the Pluto system.
The first expected photos to be released to the public will come at roughly 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Some of the more appealing pictures will be released over the next few days. It could take over two weeks for all of the images to be transmitted back to Earth and over a year before all of the spacecraft's data arrives. New Horizon's data transmission rate is one kilobit per second, a small fraction of the speed of a 56K modem, familiar to internet users of the 1990s.
It appears humans will have to drink in this wave of information through a straw.
Bob McDonald, host of CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks, explains why scientists are eagerly awaiting data and photos from the probe (watch the video at the top of this page.)
More stories about Pluto:
- Meet Pluto's smallest moons, Kerberos and Styx
- New Horizons spacecraft spots possible ice cap on Pluto
- How Dawn, New Horizons cross huge distances
- Pluto and beyond: Widening views of what makes a planet
- More stories about planets