(CNN) – has traveled more than 5,800 million kilometers to get there, and happen in that place a few hours, but is expected to ship New Horizons NASA revolutionize the way we see Pluto.
NASA plans to put the ship about 9,978 kilometers of Pluto’s surface at 6:49 am (Mexico Central Time) on Tuesday, making history as the first spacecraft to fly by the dwarf planet.
The main event will take eight to ten hours, according to NASA.
On Tuesday, New Horizons took pictures of two moons of Pluto, Nix and Hydra and getting closer to the planet at a speed of 49,600 kilometers per hour, NASA reported .
The mission will complete what the space agency calls the recognition of the classic solar system and become the United States the first country to send a spacecraft from Mercury to Pluto.
“We’ve come a long way to explore Pluto, and all indications are that will not fail,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for the mission in a report last week.
Inset: So it’s been nine years of travel to New Horizons
The probe frightened scientists on July 4 when they lost contact with her after a computer error in the control mission in the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland.
Stern “Yes we had a speed bump,” he said. Some scientific information is lost, including some pictures, she said, but the spacecraft and instruments are “operating perfectly,” he added. The team New Horizons tweeted Tuesday that the ship was on course for reconnaissance flight.
The images of the close encounter will be released on July 15 at 14:00 am (Mexico Central Time), according to the space agency.
The mission of New Horizons is to map the surfaces of Pluto and Charon, to study the atmosphere of the dwarf planet and take temperature readings.
The spacecraft was launched on January 19, 2006, before it began the great debate about Pluto. In August of the same year, the International Astronomical Union (IUA, for its acronym in English) he reclassified as a dwarf to consider it different from the rest of the planet in the Solar System.
But Stern disagrees with the decision of the IUA.
“Just’re learning that many planets are small planets, and did not know that before,” Stern said in a NASA statement. “The reality is, in planetary science, objects like Pluto and other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt are considered planets and planets called in everyday speech at scientific meetings.”
New Horizons has seven instruments on board to help scientists understand how Pluto and its moons function in relation to the other planets in our solar system.
closest to our sun-Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars The are rocky. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are gaseous giants. But Pluto is different: despite being beyond the gas giants, has a strong, icy surface.
Pluto is also small, about the size of the US, Stern said. Its largest moon, Charon, is about the size of Texas. And also it has four smaller satellites: Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.
Even before his encounter with the dwarf planet, New Horizons has already given scientists new details about the planet: Images taken during its approach show a number of nearby black spots Pluto to Ecuador, each thousands of miles.
“Our knowledge of the Pluto system is about to be dramatically revolutionized by New Horizons” , Stern said last week in the report.
The spacecraft sent the first color photo of the dwarf planet last April 15. It is equipped with infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers images, two cameras with high-resolution telescopes and two powerful particle spectrometers.
The ashes of Clyde Tombaugh
When the spacecraft NASA has its closest encounter with Pluto, the man who discovered the dwarf planet 85 years ago It will also be there.
Part of the ashes of the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh go on board the ship. The scientist raised on a farm in Kansas and worked for the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, who hired him to try to discover if there were planets beyond Neptune.
After spending thousands of hours looking at pictures of stars, Tombaugh made the discovery on 18 February, when he was 24 years old.
The knowledge of the existence of Pluto helped humanity to understand more about the solar system. Scientists now believe that there are thousands of icy planets beyond Pluto, in the region known as the Kuiper Belt.
Tombaugh died in 1997, she was 90 years old.
Beyond the dwarf planet
New Horizons looks like a great golden piano covered with foil. It measures 0.7 meters high, 2.1 meters long and 2.7 meters wide. It weighed about 478 kilograms at launch time.
The probe will not land on Pluto. Instead, it will continue flying, penetrating deeper into the Kuiper Belt. “The universe has a lot more variety than we think, and that’s wonderful,” Stern said.
“The most exciting discoveries will certainly be those who have not anticipated.”
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