A NASA
probe hurtling towards Pluto will hit
the accelerator next month when it flies past the planetary giant Jupiter.
The New
Horizons spacecraft is due to make its closest pass by Jupiter on Feb. 28
and add another 9,000 miles (14,484 kilometers) per hour to its velocity as it
speeds out towards a rendezvous with Pluto in July 2015 [image].
"This is a
big test for our mission," said Alan
Stern, NASA's New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research
Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "We're actually beginning to get data,
important scientific data, which my team is going to be rabid to work with as
soon as we get it on the ground."
New
Horizons' swing past Jupiter is a rehearsal of sorts for its ultimate flyby of Pluto and its moons
in 2015 [image].
The probe will not only study Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere, but scan its
auroras, rings, moons and - for the first time ever - the planet's trailing
magnetic field.
"There is
no mission plan to do another flyby like this of the Jupiter system," said
Stern, who spoke during a Thursday mission briefing at NASA's Washington, D.C. headquarters.
Pit Stop
to Pluto
NASA launched
its New Horizons mission one year ago Friday on what the space agency has billed as its fastest
flight to the outer rim of the solar
system [video].
With its seven
instruments, New Horizons is designed to study Pluto, its three moons - Charon,
Hydra and
Nix - and distant icy objects in the Kuiper
Belt that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Those objects, researchers hope, contain 4.5 billion-year-old traces of the
solar system's building blocks.
What New
Horizons finds at Pluto and in the Kuiper Belt should help astronomers answer
"some fundamental questions about the origin of the solar system," James Green,
acting director of NASA's Solar System division, during the briefing.
The probe
is currently 41 million miles (65 million kilometers) from Jupiter and
closing at a speed of about 44,268 miles (71,242 kilometers) per hour.
At its
closest approach, New Horizons will swing within 1.7 million miles (2.3 million
kilometers) of Jupiter to grab a gravity boost that will shave three years off
its flight to Pluto, researchers said [image].
"We've
designed this particular flyby to be a stress test on our spacecraft to work
out the kinks," Stern added.
Jupiter's
storms, moons and magnetotail
With 700
separate Jupiter system observations planned during its Jovian encounter, the
New Horizons probe will be far from idle when it swings past the gas giant planet.
"We'll be
making the most of this opportunity to learn a lot about Jupiter itself," said
John Spencer, deputy chief of New Horizons' Jupiter encounter science team at
SwRI.
New Horizons
has already made an unexpected find within Jupiter's atmosphere. Its initial
set of black and white images of the planet's notorious tempest the Great Red
Spot taken earlier this month revealed that a turbulent region to the storm's
northwest - as seen by the Cassini
probe in
2000 - appears to have calmed.
"That
region looks really quite cloud-free," Spencer said. "So that's not what we
expected."
New
Horizons will also provide a fresh look at Jupiter's four largest moons
- volcanic Io,
Europa, Ganymede
and Callisto
- as well as study the planet's auroras
and hunt for new satellites within its faint rings, researchers said.
But for
some, the highlight comes after the probe's flyby, when New Horizons will fly
through Jupiter's magnetotail, the trailing portion of the planet's magnetic
field that extends outward away from the Sun
[image].
"No
spacecraft has ever been there. We don't know what happens there," Spencer said
of Jupiter's magnetotail. "It just so happens by good luck that the path to
Pluto leads us right down the magnetotail."
Astronomers
estimate Jupiter's magnetotail sweeps across six astronomical units - or six
times the distance between the Earth
and Sun - to reach the orbit of Saturn.
One astronomical unit, or AU, is about 93 million miles (149 million
kilometers).
"This is a
whole new zone of the solar system," Stern said of New Horizons stomping
grounds. "It opens up a window into the outer solar system and a window back in
time 4.5 billion years to the birth of the planets."
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