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New Horizons completes our reconnaissance of the solar system


pavonis
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I haven't started a topic in a while, and since there's a dearth of science-related topics in the Lyceum, here's one. The United States is now the only nation to have studied every planet (dwarf or not) in the solar system!

 

  • Mercury: Mariner 10 and MESSENGER produced a complete map of the planet closest to the Sun.
  • Venus: Magellan mapped Venus from orbit in the early 1990s with radar. The Soviets managed to build landers that survived Venus' surface for a few hours - we should be able to do that, too!
  • the Moon: Surveyor landers and Apollo missions, and assorted other orbiters through the years. It's a good target for newer space agencies to aim for (India, Japan, China, etc). But will we send astronauts back, ever?
  • Mars: A busy planet - Mariners, Vikings, MERs (Opportunity still going after a decade), Curiosity, etc. We're getting to know this planet almost as well as our own.
  • Ceres and Vesta: Dawn, equipped with an ion thruster, and thus able to go into orbit and then leave orbit for another world, is trying to figure out what those bright spots on Ceres are - ice probably, but maybe something weirder.
  • Jupiter: Pioneers and Voyagers flew by, but the Galileo probe studied the system in-depth for years.
  • Saturn: Fly-bys from the same Pioneers and Voyagers, and then the orbiting Cassini probe, with the Huygens lander on Titan.
  • Uranus: Voyager 2 flew by in 1986, but got very little attention, as we were distracted by the Challenger incident that year
  • Neptune: Voyager 2 flew by in 1989, and I even got to see the original raw data and photos as they were being communicated to JPL because they shared the data with my local university as it was coming in!
  • Pluto: New Horizons fly-by

 

So, it's the end of an era. Having completed a reconnaissance of the solar system, what next? My support for manned missions varies. It's not really practical, and our probes are sufficiently sophisticated to take on the exploration of the planets without people on the ground, too. And yet some of those asteroids, and the Moon, have some things worth mining....

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And yet some of those asteroids, and the Moon, have some things worth mining....

That multi-trillion dollar asteroid just passed us. I'm sure Planetary Resources watched that with salivating mouths.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

I for one am glad you started this topic Pavonis. Please post more scientific threads! As a lay person, I've been fascinated by the Pluto flyby these last couple weeks. First, we now have close up pictures of Pluto, and we have found it to be unique looking, with both very large ice mountains comparable in size to the Rockies, and smooth areas, and Mars is not the only "red" planet. Also, we found it is larger than we thought: while Eris has more mass, Pluto has a slightly larger diameter. Photos of Charon and the other 4 moons are also interesting to me.

 

As to where to go from here, I am a fan of unmanned exploration, and think it needs to continue. I'd like to see a probe constructed that can handle Venus's atmosphere and send us data. I also recognize manned exploration isn't all that practical, but the idealist in me still would love to see NASA, or perhaps even a multinational endeavor to reach Mars. One question I have and maybe its just a matter of me being too lazy to look up, but does anyone know if the New Horizons probe can be redirected to other bodies or dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, much like the voyager probes were redirected for other originally unplanned flybys?

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... does anyone know if the New Horizons probe can be redirected to other bodies or dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, much like the voyager probes were redirected for other originally unplanned flybys?

Thanks for the encouragement. I'll add more later, but can quickly confirm that NH has a limited supply of hydrazine for course corrections. They're looking for a target to aim it at next, but the target has to be within a certain cone of the probe's current trajectory. The whole project has been done on the cheap by being small and light, including a minimum of fuel. I'm confident the planning team will find something to swing by, though it may take some time (years, maybe) to get closer to another target. And the probe won't be powerful enough to communicate any science after the 2030s (the signal will be too weak for us to pick up by then, though it'll still have power from its RTGs).

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Off topic but on topic, NASA was supposed to make an announcement today. I am curious to see about it. I hope this was not that announcement.

Kepler found another earth like planet, 1400 light years away.

 

Orbiting a star much like our sun, and a bit older than us (6 billion vs our 4.5 billion years). So maybe it developed life...or then maybe not. Venus is much like us, too, but hardly hospitable to our type of life. We don't even know if this planet, Kepler-452b, has an atmosphere. There doesn't seem to be any gas giant planets there, either. There is an idea that larger gas giants are able to divert many asteroids away from the inner solar system, preventing more impacts. Jupiter may have sheltered Earth from very devastating meteor impacts. Without any "bodyguards" for Kepler-452b, there may be many more impacts that interrupted any potential life from developing, or even blew off most of the atmosphere.

 

I have the Exoplanet app on my phone, and I recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about these extrasolar planets. It's got a neat visualization feature, showing all the exoplanets discovered so far (almost 2000 now) and their relative positions in the galaxy. You can even zoom in and "see" the planet orbiting its star.

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