There is more to come in our broadcast as Dr. Hal Weaver joins us in the studio to talk about his role
in the New Horizons project and answer more questions from our viewers. At the end of the show,
we'll give away prize packs to two of our question board participant winners.
But first, Dr. Fran Bagenal, mission co-investigator from the University of Colorado,
explains the science involved in getting New Horizons to the edge of our solar system.
We want to know a lot about Pluto because we never really got a good view of what it looks like. Even with the best telescopes,
even with the Hubble Space Telescope. It just looks like a fuzzy blob. So we are really in our exploration
phase of trying to understand this planet and get our first glimpse of what the surface looks like, see whether there are craters, volcanoes,
or frost, or cracks, or, you know, what does it look like? Pluto will be three billion miles away from Earth when we fly by.
When we arrive at Pluto, or how long it will take to get to Pluto, will depend on when we launch. If we launch on the first day,
January the 11th, then we'll get to Pluto in 2015. But if we launch a day later or several days later, we don't just get there one
or two days later,it could be as much as five years later. And the reason for this is that it depends on whether or not we
can get that gravity assist of Jupiter and it also depends on the orbits of the planets.
So a little delay can lead to a much longer duration of the mission and a longer time getting to Pluto.
One of the things that NASA wants to find out is whether or not Pluto has any more moons.
Now, very recently we've discovered that there were two new moons discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope and so now we're thinking,
are there more moons? Are there three, four, five, many?
Or are there rings? Could little Pluto have little rings around it, just as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have rings?
So NASA wants to do the basic exploration it does when it first goes to a planet which is to check it out, see what's there,
and do an inventory of what we might want to go back later and do a more thorough study of.
In order to get out to Pluto, it takes a long time to get there because it's a long way away.
And so we can either use a really big booster, or we can take advantage of the planet Jupiter on the way.
Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system, a lot of mass,
and we can use that mass to get a little more speed and get us on and help us on our way to Pluto.
What we won't be able to do as much as missions like Galileo that measured the moons around Jupiter, but we will
be able to test our cameras by taking some pictures and use the other instruments to make measurements of the environment of Jupiter.
One of the especially exciting things is to find out whether or not the moon Io, which has lots of volcanoes on it,
has had some activity since it was last visited by Galileo. So we will be looking for changes such as any
volcanic flows, things like that on the moon Io.
The Kuiper Belt has been discovered fairly recently. The first object was discovered in the Kuiper Belt about 1992,
so this is a, something like the Asteroid Belt but much, much further out.
It's out beyond the orbit of Neptune and Pluto is the king of the Kuiper Belt. It's the biggest object that we've found so far,
though we think there may be other objects going to be as big as Pluto.
And so right now, we think there are about a thousand objects spread between 30 and 50 times the
distance between the Earth and the sun, and there could be many more.
Many thanks to Fran for that fascinating presentation.