Pluto and Charon. These are REAL pictures from New Horizons. (NASA)
At about 7:50 a.m. EDT Tuesday, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will make its historic fly-by of Pluto.
This means humans will reach the edges of our solar system Tuesday morning, just 112 years after the Wright brothers made the first flight. Just let that sink in for a second. Ok, then.
New Horizons was launched in 2006 and has been on route to Pluto for about 9 1/2 years. When the spacecraft passes Pluto about 7,750 from the planet’s surface, it will have traveled slightly more than 3 billion miles. That’s the same as circling Earth 120,472 times, or traveling from Denver’s Union Station to Denver International Airport and back 63,291,139 times.
Shortly after fly-by, New Horizons will go silent in order to use energy to collect immense amounts of science data. This, of course, will leave everyone in mission control holding their breath. At about 4:20 p.m. EDT, New Horizons will send a signal back to mission control at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, which will be received at about 9 p.m., confirming that it passed through Pluto’s system unscathed. The chances of space debris damaging New Horizons are about 1:10,000, per mission primary investigator Alan Stern.
New photos of Pluto and its moons will be beamed down to Earth from space on Tuesday. Scientists expect volumes of data to continue arriving over the next year.
So how can you follow along at home? Here are some options:
NASA TV will have coverage throughout the day, starting at 5:30 a.m. local time. .
Fiske Planetarium at CU-Boulder is holding a in honor of the accomplishment, which involves hundreds of scientists, engineers and Coloradans who’ve spent years on this mission. In fact, New Horizons was .
NASA’s incredible “Eyes on the Solar System” app has been fine-tuned by JPL for New Horizons, allowing users to ride aboard a simulated spacecraft during fly-by. .
Pluto Safari is an incredible free multimedia-rich app for iPhone or Droid that includes a countdown timer, science, Pluto history, news updates and even a planetary poll:
Another fun thing is to throw your own Plutopalooza party. NASA and JHUAPL .
