NASA's New Horizons Pluto Kuiper Belt Mission was launched in January of 2006. Expected to arrive at Pluto in 2015 (exactly 364 days from now), the mission aims to help scientists gain more information about the edge of our solar system, and it could reopen the debate of Pluto's status as a planet.
Scientists have spent the past 8 ½ years waiting as the New Horizons is enduring a 3-billion-mile trip to Pluto. Prior to its launch, scientists enumerated a number of things they wanted to know about Pluto and the atmosphere beyond our solar system. The spacecraft is armed with seven instruments that scientists believe can help identify what Pluto's atmosphere is like, how it behaves, what its surface looks like, if there are any geological structures, and how solar wind interacts with its atmosphere.
A signal from the spacecraft takes 4 ½ hours to reach Earth, so the scientists decided they will program the New Horizons to go radio silent on July 14, 2015 so it can collect as much data as possible. NASA will receive all of the pertinent data the following day and begin to determine whether Pluto should be once again considered a planet after it was demoted to 'dwarf planet' status.
"At closest approach, we'll be about 6,000 miles from Pluto," said planetary scientist Alan Stern, the principal investigator for NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission, in this NPR article. "The closest any spacecraft had ever been to Pluto was ridiculously far - about a billion miles - and we've been within a billion miles of Pluto for years now, so every day we break our own record."
It's useful to know the responsibility of each instrument aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, and NASA provides all of the relative information. The 'Ralph' instrument is a visible and infrared imager/spectrometer and provides color, composition, and thermal maps; the 'Alice' instrument is an ultraviolet spectrometer that will analyze the composition and structure of Pluto's atmosphere; the 'REX' instrument measures atmospheric composition and temperature; the 'LORRI' instrument is a telescopic camera that will map Pluto's far side and provide high resolution geologic data; the 'SWAP' instrument is a solar wind and plasma spectrometer; the 'PEPSSI' instrument is an energetic particle spectrometer that will measure the composition and density of plasma ions escaping from Pluto's atmosphere; and the 'SDC' instrument will measure space dust collection during the spacecraft's trip across the solar system. The full list and descriptions of these instruments can be found on the NASA website.
Not only will New Horizons provide never-before-obtained information about Pluto, but it will also continue traveling beyond the dwarf planet and into the outer rim of the solar system and hopefully give scientists a look beyond our boundaries. The NASA Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission team reiterated that the New Horizons spacecraft is healthy and full of fuel and they remain confident of its abilities.
You can read more about the New Horizons spacecraft and the Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission on the mission's webpage.
