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Don Riefler, Museum Port Coordinator and Science Educator, shares the insights of the museum's Extraordinary Scientist-in-Residence, astronaut Dr. David Wolf.
If you’ve been keeping up with the news for the past few weeks you might know that NASA has a milestone coming up. The New Horizons spacecraft is going to have the closest encounter with dwarf planet Pluto of any spacecraft ever, and it’s been a long time coming. NASA launched New Horizons in January of 2006, nine and a half years ago! That’s how long it takes to get to Pluto even at the incredible speed New Horizons is moving. Since it passed by Jupiter in 2007 it’s been going at 51,000 miles per hour! Once it passes by Pluto it will continue its mission in the Kuiper belt, an enormous area of space past Neptune full of dwarf planets and other objects.
It’s kind of amazing that NASA scientists can figure out how to hit a target as small as Pluto from about 4.5 billion miles away and almost ten years in the past. The European Space Agency did something just as incredible recently: they landed something on a comet! The lander is called Philae, and the spacecraft that delivered it is called the Rosetta probe, which orbits around the comet. Here are the thoughts of Dr. David Wolf, our resident astronaut, on the Rosetta/Philae mission.
We have been talking about Spacecraft New Horizons closing in on Pluto for its close encounter next week. But since November 12th, 2014—almost 6 months ago—the robotic probe, Philae, has been perched tenuously on Comet 67P (Churyumov-Gerasimenko), not well positioned to gather essential sunlight to generate electrical power. This is because it took an unexpected huge bounce at touchdown and came to rest in a non-optimal position on the comet’s surface. A few days after landing it tweeted that it was getting tired and needed to go to sleep! We then lost radio contact. But, last month it briefly “awoke” and faithfully reported back to Earth with an 85 second long transmission of data. This gives us hope that it may do better as it approaches the sun, riding its comet taxi, and could more fully charge its essential solar batteries.
Here’s a cool picture of comet 67P compared to a large US city. It may seem big, but it’s tiny compared to the whole Earth and yet scientists managed to land a tiny machine on it after over ten years of space travel! You can learn more about the Pluto fly-by in this series of infographics from nature.com.
Photo by Flickr user anosmicovni.
