The Department of Physics and Astronomy is hosting a “Pluto Palooza” in honor of the New Horizons spacecraft sending an image of Pluto to Earth.
On Tuesday, the department will broadcast NASA’s live TV feed of the spacecraft from 6 to 8 p.m. in LNCO 1100. Before going to the event, Paul Ricketts, the South Physics Observatory manager and an AstronomUr Outreach staff member, and Benjamin Bromley, a U professor in theoretical astrophysics and planet environments, said it’s important to know a little bit about Pluto and New Horizons.
“Pluto is the furthest world and the furthest distance we’ve ever studied an object with a probe,” Ricketts said.
In nine years, New Horizons has traveled nearly 3 billion miles. The spacecraft will pass by Pluto, and the neighboring dwarf-planet Charon, at over 30,000 mph. New Horizons is meant to help researchers study Pluto — what it is made of and how it correlates with its moons.
“Pluto is cool, whether or not you think it is a planet,” Bromley said. “This is a great step for NASA and space exploration in general.”
Bromely, who has conducted research on Pluto, Charon and other planets in relation to binary stars at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said after New Horizons has collected its data during the Pluto flyby, NASA intends for it to aim further away from the sun, into a region called the Kuiper Belt to learn more about the outer solar system.
For more information on the data New Horizons will collect and its passing-by of Pluto, go to: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html. For more details on Tuesday night’s event, visit: web.utah.edu/astro.
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