Journey to Pluto and beyond
When the New Horizons space probe left Earth on January 19, 2006, it was on a mission to the planet Pluto. When it arrived at its destination more than nine years later, Pluto was no longer a planet It had been officially demoted to a dwarf planet a few months after the New Horizons lift-off.
Recently retired from NASA, Dr Jim Adams, will enthral audiences at Scifest Africa with his presentation about how the New Horizons mission was put together, what it discovered when it arrived at Pluto and what it is still expected to achieve as it hurtles through the Kuiper Belt.
Adams played a leading role in the New Horizons and other high-profile missions including the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory, the Dawn mission to Ceres and Vesta as well as the MESSENGER spacecraft that orbited Mercury.
Pluto was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. An 11year old British schoolgirl, Venetia Burney, suggested the name ‘Pluto’ the Roman god of the underworld for the darkest and most distant planet.
For the next 76 years we were taught that Pluto is the ninth planet of our solar system, but there were always dissenters who said that it was too small to be considered a planet. They pointed out that our moon, and several other moons orbiting Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, are a lot bigger than Pluto.
Eventually, the International Astronomical Union decided that because Pluto does not dominate its neighbourhood and sweep up asteroids, comets, and other debris along its orbit, it can no longer be considered a planet. It was dropped from the team because it is untidy.
The demotion certainly made some people miserable, but it did not put a damper on the New Horizons crew. They forged ahead with the enthusiasm of a team that knew it had important ground breaking work to do.
Doing research for the flyby, the team used the Hubble Telescope to look out for bodies that might threaten the New Horizons spacecraft and they spotted four small moons to add to Charon, a fairly large moon that was discovered in 1978.
Preparation was everything. Their piano-sized spacecraft was flying at close to 50,000 km per hour when it reached Pluto. At this incredibly high speed, the actual flyby could only last three minutes but the close encounter lasted several hours. There were no second chances.
Adams will share with Scifest audiences what the New Horizons mission found in its brief encounter with Pluto.
He will also explain how the amazing spacecraft will move on beyond the orbit of the dwarf planet for its next flyby of a 40Km-wide Kuiper Belt Object provisionally designated 2014 MU69. The flyby is expected to happen some 6.4 billion kilometres from Earth on New Year’s Day 2019.
Visitors interested in space exploration will have a rich variety of exhibitions and lectures to attend at Scifest Africa 2017.
Dr Linday Magnus Chief Scientist of the Square Kilometre Array has a lecture de-