#pluto postcards

The Goldstone 70-m antenna, one of three antennae that are part of the Deep Space Network.  Source: NASA

Wake up, New Horizons!  This Saturday, December 6, New Horizons will come out of hibernation for the last time before its encounter in July 2015.  Throughout the cruise, New Horizons has been put in and out of hibernation, which prevents the electronics from aging as quickly during the nine years they’ve spent in space so far.  It won’t return to hibernation for at least the next two years.

There will be some events going on for the wake-up: the mission will be live-tweeting the wake up. Once we hear from the spacecraft, an announcement will be made to the media, and there will be a wakeup song, .  The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla has a write-up on the wake-up and the encounter.  The Planetary Society is also hosting a live wake-up event, on Saturday December 6 from 9 to 10 PM EST. 

While the folks at Mission Operations (MOps) at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL)  will be testing the spacecraft over the next month, I don’t have any duties related to the wake up as a post-doc on the science team.  January 15, 2015 marks the beginning of Approach Phase 1 (AP1), and the first approach science.  Even though we will take more detailed measurements during Approach Phase 2,  I will be using some of these early AP1 navigation images taken by the LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to continue making a solar phase curve for Pluto.

We’re doing an AMA on Reddit!

Next Monday, October 6 at 1 PM EDT, along with PI Alan Stern, and postdocs Kelsi Singer, Simon Porter, Alex Parker and Jason Cook, we’ll be answering your questions about the mission, Pluto and New Horizons.

Before we got time on the Hubble Space Telescope, the New Horizons KBO search team had been searching for a target to visit beyond Pluto using ground-based telescopes.  Recently, I had been helping with some of the data processing and the fun part … looking for undiscovered objects. The above animation is a Kuiper Belt Object I found in images that were taken at the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in April/May using an instrument called Megacam.  I’ve been hunting for KBO targets for the extended mission for New Horizons, much in the same way Clyde Tombaugh hunted for Pluto in 1930.   Take a picture of the sky.  Wait.  Take another.  Blink them.  If anything moves against the background, it is in the Solar System.  The slower it moves, the further away it is.

Of course, I have a few advantages over Clyde.  For one, these data were taken with a bigger telescope, and each image is the sum of an hour’s worth of observing.  I’m seeing things that are about 10,000 times fainter than Tombaugh ever could.  A computer screen is also easier on the eyes than the machine Clyde Tombaugh used, called the blink comparator.  We’ve also tried to make it a bit easier: the varying black and white dots you see mark our attempts to get rid of non-moving, non-solar system objects, aka stars. The average star gets subtracted off, so if the brightness/position differs from the average, you will see a dark or light spot on the frame.  Since moving objects will always be brighter than an average spot, they do NOT go away.

Object hunting is addictive and a lot of fun.  I found 100 moving objects in 108 areas (three fields and 36 chips on Megacam), and Marc Buie and I fit orbits to them to figure out whether any of these objects could be accessible to New Horizons.  The moment of truth!  Of the 100 objects I found, 94 were merely main belt asteroids.  Six objects were KBOs.  Of the 6 KBOs, we know that two are definitely objects from previous surveys (I’ve discovered that discovering that the object you discovered was discovered two years ago is a bit of a bummer).  It will take a lot more work to determine that the remaining four are not unique objects.