>Chronology

Launch vehicle: Atlas V 551 first stage; Centaur second stage; STAR 48B third stage

Location: Cape Canaveral, Florida

Trajectory: To Pluto using Jupiter's gravity.

Path

Beginning of the journey: The first 13 months - removing the spacecraft and turning on the instruments, calibration, slight correction of the trajectory using maneuvers and rehearsal for the meeting with Jupiter. New Horizons orbited Mars on April 7, 2006; it also tracked a small asteroid, later named "APL", in June 2006.

Jupiter: Closest approach occurred on February 28, 2007, at 51,000 miles per hour (about 23 kilometers per second). New Horizons flew 3 to 4 times closer to Jupiter than the Cassini spacecraft, which was within 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) due to the planet's large size.

Interplanetary cruise: During the approximately 8-year journey to Pluto, all spacecraft instruments were turned on and tested, course trajectories were adjusted and an encounter with a distant planet was rehearsed.

During the cruise, New Horizons also visited the orbits of Saturn (June 8, 2008), Uranus (March 18, 2011), and Neptune (August 25, 2014).

Pluto system

In January 2015, New Horizons began the first of several stages of approach that will culminate in the first close flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. On its closest approach, the craft will pass within about 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto and 17,900 miles (28,800 kilometers) of Charon.

Beyond Pluto: Kuiper Belt

The spacecraft has the ability to fly beyond the Pluto system and explore new Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). It carries additional hydrazine fuel for the flight to the defense complex; The craft's communications system is designed to operate well beyond Pluto's orbit, and the science instruments can function in conditions worse than Pluto's dim sunlight.

Thus, the New Horizons team had to undertake a special search for small bodies in the OBE system that the ship could reach. In the early 2000s, the Kuiper Belt had not even been discovered. The National Academy of Sciences will direct New Horizons to fly to small OPCs 20 to 50 kilometers (about 12 to 30 miles) across, which are likely primitive and less informative than planets such as Pluto.

In 2014, using the Hubble Space Telescope, members of the New Horizons science team discovered three objects within the OPC - all 20-55 kilometers across. Possible dates for their flyby are at the end of 2018 or in 2019 at a distance of a billion miles from Pluto.

In the summer of 2015, after the Pluto flyby, the New Horizons team will work with NASA to select the best candidate among the three. In the fall of 2015, operators will start the engines aboard New Horizons at the optimal time to minimize the fuel required to reach the chosen destination and begin the journey.

All NASA missions strive to do more than just reconnaissance of their primary objectives, so they have been asked to fund an expanded mission. A proposal to further study the defense industry will be put forward in 2016; It will be evaluated by an independent panel of experts to determine the merits of such a move: the team will analyze the health of the spacecraft and its instruments, the contribution to science that New Horizons can make to the military-industrial complex, the cost of flight and exploration of the target point in the Kuiper Belt, and much more. .

If NASA approves the move, New Horizons would launch a new mission in 2017, giving its team time to plan for an impact that would take place one to two years later.

The New Horizons mission team organized a press conference on July 17, 2015 at 20:00 Moscow time, at which they reported the latest data about Pluto and its system received from the automatic interplanetary station. Scientists on the dwarf planet discovered an icy plain with unusual geology, possible evidence of the presence of winds and geysers on the former ninth planet, as well as a plasma tail, and estimated the size of what turned out to be a gigantic atmosphere of Pluto. Together with NASA, Science and New Scientist, Lenta.ru talks about this and future exploration of distant worlds.

Geology

Scientists presented high-resolution photographs of Pluto's surface. They show interesting geological features of the dwarf planet - lumpy hills above the plains, a ribbed surface of the ice fields, probably due to erosion, as well as channels delimiting the ice plains. Particular attention was drawn to the spotted dark stripes on the ice - possible traces of cryovolcanism, geyser eruptions, the same as those observed in 1989 on Neptune's moon Triton.

More and more evidence is accumulating indicating that geological processes are still actively occurring on Pluto, and not just simple temperature fluctuations and changes in wind speed in its rarefied atmosphere. If the dwarf planet were a quiet world, high ice mountains would not form on its plains, but traces of impact craters would be visible.

These ice rocks, according to scientists, could have formed a hundred million years ago, and several weeks before the station’s approach to Pluto. Something causes the water ice that mountains are largely made of to rise in defiance of gravity. And scientists did not expect to see such a plain as this.

When the New Horizons station flew in the shadow of a dwarf planet, it was possible to analyze its atmosphere. In particular, it was discovered that of its two models - turbulent and calm, most likely the second one corresponds to reality. The data obtained indicate that the wind speed at the surface of Pluto is 1-2 meters per second. This is enough to move the smallest particles of ice.

Image: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Wind likely contributes to erosion on Pluto's surface. However, this does not answer the question of how, for example, Mount Norgay was formed, a video of a flyby over which was shown by NASA. It is surrounded by an icy plain, and it is unclear how susceptible the mountain is to erosion processes.

The nature of the polygonal channels delimiting segments of the ice plain is also unclear. They could have arisen as a result of cooling and subsequent compression, or formed as a result of convection of matter from the interior of the dwarf planet into its atmosphere.

Scientists were also surprised to discover that the Sputnik Plateau is covered with a layer of carbon monoxide ice. Its exact thickness is unknown, however, according to available data, it is clearly more than one centimeter. If not much more, then most likely it is an analogue of water snow.

However, it did not necessarily fall from above. Scientists do not rule out that “snow” could have gotten onto the plateau from the bowels of the planet, in particular from geysers. The wind could spread the substance from the geysers evenly across the plateau.

NASA images published on July 15 show a 3.5-kilometer-high mountain on the surface of the dwarf planet. It is located in the middle of a plain, and there are no visible traces of impact craters around. This also indicates active geological processes on the surface of Pluto.

Previously, astronomers believed that high mountains on small celestial bodies (in particular, satellites of giant planets) are formed as a result of their gravitational interaction with larger bodies. Since there are no such in the immediate vicinity of Pluto, this mechanism does not work for it. This means that it may not work for other bodies in the Solar System.

Scientists believed that active geological processes could not occur in such a distant and cold object as Pluto, which arose billions of years ago. Probably, the source of energy for them is the internal heat released as a result of radioactive reactions in the bowels of the celestial body.

Larry Cederbloom of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff in northern Arizona, who once participated in the Voyager mission, noted the similarities and differences between Pluto and Triton, Neptune's largest moon. According to the popular point of view, Triton was previously located, like Pluto, in the Kuiper belt, but was then captured by Neptune and became its satellite. On Triton, scientists also suggest the existence of cryovolcanism, but tidal influence from Neptune is indicated as a source of internal heat. In addition, Triton, like Pluto, has few craters, but Neptune's moon does not have high mountains.

The full New Horizons mission is expected to last 15-17 years.

New Horizons left the area at the fastest speed of any spacecraft. At the moment the engines were turned off, it was 16.26 km/s (relative to the Earth). The heliocentric speed was 45 km/s, which would allow New Horizons to escape even without a gravity assist maneuver near Jupiter. However, in 2015, the heliocentric speed of the device was about 14.5 km/s, which is less than the speed of Voyager 1 - 17.012 km/s (Voyager 1 gained greater speed due to the additional gravitational maneuver y).

Mission Goals

The main goals of the mission are to study the formation of the Pluto-Charon system, the formation of the Kuiper belt, and the processes that occurred in the early stages of the evolution of the Solar system. The spacecraft will study the surface and atmosphere of objects in the Pluto system, the immediate environment of Pluto. Similar studies are possible for Kuiper belt objects in the extended mission.

In particular, the following scientific observations will be made:

• Mapping the surface of Pluto and Charon
• Study of the geology and morphology of Pluto and Charon
• Study of Pluto's atmosphere and its dispersion into the surrounding space
• Searching for the atmosphere of Charon
• Constructing a surface temperature map of Pluto and Charon
• Search for rings and new satellites of Pluto
• Study of Kuiper Belt Objects

New Horizons is a NASA spacecraft launched as part of the New Frontiers program and designed to study Pluto and its moon Charon. New Horizons was the first in history to transmit color images of a dwarf planet and will be the first to study it thoroughly. The device left the vicinity of the Earth at the fastest speed among known devices. The device was launched in January 2006 and almost ten years later, by the summer of 2015, it will reach Pluto. In total, the mission is designed until 2026.

At the beginning of 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew past the most distant object studied by people - . At the end of January, researchers showed a qualitative one of which everyone was under the impression that it had the shape of a dumbbell. It turned out that this idea was wrong - new photos showed that the object has a flattened shape, with one of the parts much thinner than the other.

Despite the fact that the device is located at a distance of more than 160 million kilometers from its target - the dwarf planet Ultima Thule (2014 MU69) with a diameter of 15-20 kilometers - the interplanetary automatic station "" provided the first photograph of the object of interest. The image of the dwarf planet was obtained using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) telescopic camera mounted on the device on August 16 and published by the aerospace agency