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Our last question is from David from New York: New Horizons is supposed to get no closer than 10,000 kilometers from Pluto.

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Why can't New Horizons get closer, and how will this affect the resolution of the images returned?

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That's a great question, because the closer you get, of course, the higher your resolution, but -- at least on the face of it.

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But it turns out, we've done, several years ago, studies specifically addressing this, this question. Because you want to know,

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what's the optimum distance to travel in order to get the best resolution? If you fly too close to Pluto, what happens is,

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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.

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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,

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to keep those images nice and clear. So, even though you're closer, you don't really get the higher resolution.

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Now, if you get farther away though, then you just don't get the resolution. You know,

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if you go 20,000 kilometers away, that would still meet our scientific objectives, but it wouldn't be as good as 10.

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So it just turns out that, after these careful studies, knowing what the limitations of the spacecraft are,

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how fast it can scan and how close we can go, how close we can target, the 10,000 kilometers was the magic number.

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Thank you, Hal, for your insight. It seems like

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a lot of long hours and hard work went into bringing New Horizons to this point.

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And thanks for being a part of NASA Direct broadcast.

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Thank you.

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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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Two lucky winners are about to find out that they will be getting New Horizons Mission gift packs.

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Our winners for today's broadcast are Colleen from Long Island and Pawan from Sharjah.

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Please remember to join the Virtual Launch Control Center on launch day.

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You can track the countdown moment by moment, right from your computer. Thanks so much for joining us.

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I'm Tiffany Nail.  (Music).

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