Hello Pluto, New Horizons said. Historical observation to 12 500km – Daily News – Lisbon

At one time, the probe New Horizons NASA said hello to Pluto, when it began exactly 12,500 kilometers from the dwarf planet. It was 12:49 in Lisbon. A novel approach that took nine years to be realized, but that ended, at least for now, with a happy ending. Now, we must wait for the probe to send the material collected to allow scientists to access new data about the surface and atmosphere of Pluto, still largely unknown.

The enthusiasm was visible this morning at the University John Hopkins, where many waited to watch the historic moment in which the probe was to pass along Pluto.

The NASA put however, on Twitter, a summary of a computer simulation of the approach of the probe.

If all goes well, scientists will now have a wealth of new data and images to make a new portrait of Pluto and Charon. This is a new page in the history of space exploration.

With the rapid approach of the spacecraft to its target in recent weeks, the news began arriving even before the first close encounter of a ship earth Pluto, marked for today. At a distance of eight million kilometers, and after seven, five, one … the dwarf planet on the border of the solar system was gaining definition and there is still a month or two were just glows and shadows on its surface gained new potential meanings: impact craters and volcanoes, mountains and frozen lakes hydrogen. But these are working hypotheses because only the data gathered by ship today can be taken teimas and check what actually is observed in those distant worlds.

For this, the New Horizons has been equipped with a set of seven instruments, including three cameras to capture images, a telescopic them to make high-resolution images of the surface, two espetrómetros, a dust sensor and radar

During the short meeting -. the ship travels to 49 000 kilometers per hour and now moves into the Kuyper belt on the border of the solar system – will be possible to make thermal maps of the atmosphere and Charon and Pluto’s surface, analyze the composition and structure of the enigmatic atmosphere of the latter, identify geological patterns on the surface of both and also detect and quantify dust, so that those two small icy worlds will emerge before our eyes with a new face.

During the crucial moment of the flight, the ship will not be in communication with the earth, because it can not do both things at once, and so will have to spend a few hours until the first signs of the probe come to the mission control center at Johns Hopkins in United States, where the expectation is to be maximum.

It is supposed to ship hold a “call home” to 04:20 (21:20 in Lisbon), but this signal sent to Earth will It takes almost five hours to get to scientists. For this reason, NASA will not make any announcements, whether the ship survive or not until nearly 13 hours of flight on the planet, at 09:02 (02:02 on Wednesday in Portugal). Already missing bit.