Pixelated Moon: Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Gets First View of Charon: Scientific American Gallery

Pixelated Moon: Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Gets First View of Charon

 

image:NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

 

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now en route to Pluto, got its first glimpse of the dwarf planet’s largest moon, Charon, in this image released July 10.

Pluto is the bright spot in the center of the image. Charon is the faint smudge up and to the left. New Horizons snapped the picture at about 900 million kilometers from Pluto—six times the distance between Earth and the sun. At that distance, the light from Charon and Pluto takes about 48 minutes to reach New Horizons’s cameras. Charon is roughly the size of Texas, but to the approaching craft it appears no wider than a U.S. quarter seen from 17 kilometers away

Until 2005 Charon was Pluto’s only known moon. Since then astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered four more: Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx. Kerberos and Styx are the smallest, each only about a dozen kilometers across; they received their official names just last week.

via Pixelated Moon: Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Gets First View of Charon: Scientific American Gallery.

New Space Engine Could Turn Tiny CubeSats into Interplanetary Explorers: Scientific American

Artist's concept of a tiny CubeSat equipped with the new CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster system, or CAT.
Artist’s concept of a tiny CubeSat equipped with the new CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster system, or CAT.

Image: Ben Longmier – University of Michigan

Researchers plan to launch a tiny spacecraft

Researchers plan to launch a tiny spacecraft to Earth orbit and beyond within the next 18 months, in a key test of new propulsion technology that could help cut the cost of planetary exploration by a factor of 1,000.

The scientists and engineers are developing a new plasma propulsion system designed for ultrasmall CubeSats. If all goes well, they say, it may be possible to launch a life-detection mission to Jupiter’s ocean-harboring moon Europa or other intriguing worlds for as little as $1 million in the not-too-distant future.

“We want to enable new missions that right now cost about $1 billion, or maybe $500 million — to go, for example, explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn,” said project leader Ben Longmier, a plasma physicist and assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

To get the ball rolling, Longmier and his team launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website Kickstarter Thursday (July 4). They hope to raise a minimum of $200,000 by Aug. 5, which should be enough to loft the miniature thruster on its maiden space voyage.

via New Space Engine Could Turn Tiny CubeSats into Interplanetary Explorers: Scientific American.

Mars Rover Curiosity Begins Trek Toward Mount Sharp | NASA

NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity looks back at wheel tracks made during the first drive away from the last science target in the "Glenelg" area
This view from the left Navigation Camera (Navcam) of NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity looks back at wheel tracks made during the first drive away from the last science target in the “Glenelg” area. The drive commenced a long trek toward the mission’s long-term destination: Mount Sharp.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

PASADENA, Calif. – With drives on July 4 and July 7, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has departed its last science target in the “Glenelg” area and commenced a many-month overland journey to the base of the mission’s main destination, Mount Sharp.

The rover finished close-up investigation of a target sedimentary outcrop called “Shaler” last week. On July 4, it drove 59 feet (18 meters) away from Shaler. On July 7, a second drive added another 131 feet (40 meters) on the trip toward a destination about 5 miles (8 kilometers) away, the entry to the lower layers of Mount Sharp.

Mount Sharp, in the middle of Gale Crater, exposes many layers where scientists anticipate finding evidence about how the ancient Martian environment changed and evolved.  In the Glenelg area, where Curiosity worked for the first half of 2013, the rover found evidence for an ancient wet environment that had conditions favorable for microbial life. This means the mission already accomplished its main science objective.

via Mars Rover Curiosity Begins Trek Toward Mount Sharp | NASA.