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Glittering prizes
within Pluto data
By Chris Starr FRAS FBIS
It is exactly one year since New Horizons hurtled through the Pluto system at 49,600 km/h, after a journey of nearly nine and a half years, its array of scientific instruments gathering precious data on this hitherto mysterious world and its family of moons. We shared in the thrill of the flyby
and then watched in awe as a new world was finally revealed in all its
beauty and complex detail. The final approach of the probe, its flyby,
the first images and data were featured in RocketSTEM last summer.
Since its historic encounter, the 400kg spacecraft, the first to explore
the dwarf planet, has been slowly transmitting back to Earth the wealth
of data collected last summer and stored in its onboard computers. As
of July 2016 about three-quarters of the 50-plus gigabits of data collected have been downloaded. This has enabled the science team to
build up a comprehensive portrait of the dwarf planet, its five moons
and their environment in space.
What was little more than a point of light for much of the 85 years
since its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, is now revealed in detail
as a real world. The results so far are spectacular and surprising. In the
words of Dr. Leslie Young, New Horizons’ Deputy Project Scientist, ‘Pluto
did not disappoint. It was the star and we were the paparazzi!’
This article provides an overview, one year on, of the discoveries
made so far from its brief encounter, as well as some of Dr. Young’s reflections on the mission and her role in planning the encounter.
Figure 1: Iconic image – the enhanced-colour portrait of Pluto taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) from a distance of 450,000 km (280,000 miles). Centred on the ‘heart’
of Tombaugh Regio, it shows features as small as 2.2 km (1.4 miles). Four images were combined with
colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this view. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
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