New Horizons under way

[bjarvis]

I was hugely relieved to hear that New Horizons, the Pluto fast fly-by probe, was successfully launched yesterday.

I've been fascinated by photos returned by planetary probes since I was old enough to read about the early probes to Mars & Venus. I was too young to understand the importance of Pioneer 10 & 11, but was utterly absorbed by the Voyager 1 & 2 photos of Jupiter & Saturn, then the later images of Uranus & Neptune. With dwindling resources for planetary missions and huge gobs of money being sucked up by the shuttle program, I always wondered if we'd manage to get photos of Pluto in my lifetime. While we still may not get there soon enough to see an atmosphere, unless there's a disaster we should see something.

Not having the plutonium generator blow up on the launch pad or upper atmosphere was a nice thing too. That whole Cosmos 954 thing 20+ years ago was a little too close to home.

Comments

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I was of mixed thoughts on this. On the one hand, it's a nice romantic sentiment to send along a little chunk of Clyde and I'm sure it brought a smile to his widow's face. On the other, where's the science in this and how much travel time could we shave off if this little extra weight wasn't added? With Pluto's atmosphere collapsing as it passes into winter, time is really of the essence in this particular mission.

Sorry, Clyde. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

I very much doubt that anything was compromised here. I couldn't find any details, but I would be surprised if there were more than a fraction of a gram of Clyde aboard. Certainly far less than the greeting plaque aboard the Voyager probes, or the audio recording on the later probe whose name escapes me at the moment, and certainly not enough to displace anything worth discussing.

And orbital mechanics aren't that simple. You get a limited choice of low-energy transfer orbits. Within a very broad range it doesn't much matter how much delta-V you have available, you're still going to have to take the same route.