Some foreigners may have become little green envious men over NASA's brilliant New Horizons achievement,but British physicist Stephen Hawking was not among them.Dr.Hawking immediately relayed his warm congratulations to his American colleagues as the sturdy spacecraft entered the Pluto system on 14 July.*
We have telemetry lock,said Dr.Alice Bowman,NASA Mission Operations Manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel,Maryland,as she received word that New Horizons phoned home at 8:52 pm ET at the end of the exhilarating yet tiring day.The spacecraft had survived its rendezvous with the dwarf planet Pluto.Immediately it went back to work gathering data from the rest of its flyby.
New Horizons will go on to explore more deep space bodies in the Kuiper Belt,a ring of icy objects ranging from boulders to dwarf planets at the edge of the solar system.The plutonium-powered spacecraft can operate and return data for at least 20 years,exploring the outer heliosphere,or area of the Sun's influence,and possibly even beyond into interstellar space,as has its predecessor Voyager I,according to Principal Investigator Dr.Alan Stern.The difference is,New Horizons has much better instruments than the two Voyager spacecraft have.
The New Horizons team has been working 24/7 for the last 6 months at APL in preparation for the flyby.One of the latest photos from the probe shows a young mountain range on Pluto near the equator.Pluto's mountains are up to 11,000 feet in height.An abundance of methane has been detected across Pluto's frosty surface,but with striking differences from place to place.
Another new photo shows surprising,young and varied terrain on Pluto's largest moon,Charon.Charon has a 4-6 mile canyon,as well as troughs and cliffs.This blog also noted a smooth area near Charon's north pole that resembles Mare Crisium on our own Moon.Pluto's moon Hydra is potato-shaped and is made mostly of water ice.
Pluto has a thin nitrogen atmosphere and colour variation across its surface.
Data from the Pluto flyby alone will pour in from New Horizons over the next 16 months and may take upwards of a decade to interpret.
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