Our last question is from David from New York: New Horizons is supposed to get no closer than 10,000 kilometers from Pluto.
Why can't New Horizons get closer, and how will this affect the resolution of the images returned?
That's a great question, because the closer you get, of course, the higher your resolution, but -- at least on the face of it.
But it turns out, we've done, several years ago, studies specifically addressing this, this question. Because you want to know,
what's the optimum distance to travel in order to get the best resolution? If you fly too close to Pluto, what happens is,
you get so close that Pluto appears to move so quickly that your, your spacecraft can't scan fast enough to keep the images from smearing.
So if you tried to target closer than 10,000 kilometers, we wouldn't be able to swing fast enough, swing the spacecraft fast enough,
to keep those images nice and clear. So, even though you're closer, you don't really get the higher resolution.
Now, if you get farther away though, then you just don't get the resolution. You know,
if you go 20,000 kilometers away, that would still meet our scientific objectives, but it wouldn't be as good as 10.
So it just turns out that, after these careful studies, knowing what the limitations of the spacecraft are,
how fast it can scan and how close we can go, how close we can target, the 10,000 kilometers was the magic number.
Thank you, Hal, for your insight. It seems like
a lot of long hours and hard work went into bringing New Horizons to this point.
And thanks for being a part of NASA Direct broadcast.
Thank you.
Before we go, we'd like to say thanks to all our viewers who submitted such great questions and to our other guests who participated in this broadcast.
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I'm Tiffany Nail. (Music).