Monday, January 16, 2006
New Horizons for Pluto
Hello good morning and welcome to a rather spacey edition of Cybersurf where we look to the furthest reaches of our solar system. I am your Cybershost Steven Lang.
Only yesterday, the Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth carrying samples of dust and carbon based samples from its close encounter with comet WILD 2 (pronounced Vilt). The purpose of this mission was to fly into outer space, approach the comet and collect dust samples from the tail and from interstellar space on its aerogel array.
The reason why scientists want to bring some dust back to Earth is because they believe these tiny particles can reveal valuable infomration about the origins of our solar system.
To find out more about this apparently succesful mission - the Stardust comet sample return mission - you should type in the following address: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov.
Not only is the site full of pictures and information – but it also provides a podcast containing interviews with scientists involved in the project. Besides this, the site invites Internet users to get involved and participate in a distributed computing project to help analyse the data brought back by Stardust.
However, yesterday’s landing is only a preview to an even more exciting mission that is set for lift-off in roughly thirty six hours.
Ask any school child which is the furthest planet from the Sun and she will tell you that Pluto is not only the smallest planet in our solar system but it is also furthest from our life giving star.
But ….
This is not neccessarily true – first of all because, Pluto does fly closer to the sun for part of its orbit – thus making it closer than Neptune – but nowadays – it is not universally accepted that Pluto is in fact a planet. Some astromers say that if it were discovered now, in the twenty first century instead of in 1930 – it would be considered too small to qualify as a planet.
Incidently, an eleven year old girl – Venetia Burney – named the planet after the Roman god the Underworld. – And just as a amazing – Mrs. Phair, as Venetia is now known, s still alive and doing well in England
About six months ago, astronomers announced the discovery of 2003 UB313 – a body which appears to be larger than Pluto and further away from the Sun – so if Pluto is a planet well then, shouldn’t 2003 UB313 also be given such a title?
The problem is that there appears to be quite a few planetismals out in the Kuiper belt that are in the same size range as Pluto.
So let us return to the NASA mission set for launching tomorrow.
New Horizons – as it is called - ll be the first ever on to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. To find out more visit this site:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ - I’ll repeat that http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/
The front page has a count down read-out till lift-off; a web cam image of mission control; a timeline of all the important dates on the way to Pluto – New Horizons will only get there in 2015, and loads of other relevant infomration.
So before I blast off out of this studio let me remind you that you can find the full script of this program on the Cybersurf blog which you will find at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com
Thanks for listening and remember to keeep on surfing.
