New Horizons automatic interplanetary station will wake up tomorrow

The device will wake up in order to proceed to the active phase of its mission - approaching Pluto (I remind you that Pluto is now considered to be a planetoid, a dwarf planet) and its satellite Charon. An interesting fact is that the station was sent before Pluto officially ceased to be considered a planet.

New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, with the highest speed of all spacecraft. According to the Wiki , when the engines were turned off, the speed was 16.26 km / s relative to the Earth. During his long-term journey, the device several times went out of hibernation to check the operation of the systems and study the surrounding space (for example, the station “woke up” at the time of its passage near Jupiter). In general, for all the time the device fell asleep and woke up 18 times. The minimum “sleep” period is 36 days, the maximum is 202.
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Hibernation device needs to save energy. Only the performance of the monitoring systems and the transmitter, which gave a signal to Earth once a week, remained.


So was the launch of the station

Tomorrow at 11 pm Moscow time, the device should wake up and begin to approach the Pluto. What will the device do next?

Already in January, the station will fly at a distance of 75 million kilometers from the asteroid VNH0004, New Horizons will try to get some information about this object.

Then, from mid-January, the stage of the study of Pluto will begin, with an attempt to fix the nearest objects (perhaps, some cosmic bodies will fly by next to the apparatus). Already in May, the device will be able to receive high-quality photos of Pluto, the resolution of which will be higher than that of Hubble photos.



In the summer of next year, New Horizons will fly at a distance of only about 10 thousand kilometers from the surface of Pluto. This will allow to obtain the highest quality photos of the planetoid for all the time of observations. It is planned that during this time the device will collect more than 4 gigabytes of information, which will then be transmitted to Earth. By the way, these data will also be used to test the hypothesis of the existence of liquid water under the ice.

The next stage of research is the year 2016-2020, then New Horizons will be able to transmit information about what the device "sees" in the Kuiper belt. The future of the device is not yet defined in detail. That is, it is known that New Horizons will study the Kuiper belt, but how long the station can function is difficult to say. It is expected that New Horizons will work until 2026.

By the way, nothing human is alien to astronomers, and the project team sent a capsule to New Horizons with a small amount of the ashes of Pluto's discoverer Clyde Tumb. Plus, the device bears on itself a CD with the names of people who participated in the action Send Your Name to Pluto (there were 434 thousand 738 people in total).

And the results of the work of the station should really open up new horizons for us, in this sense the name for the interplanetary station was chosen perfectly. It remains only to wait until the “plowing the expanses of the Universe” stamp will cease to be a metaphor.