New Horizons Pluto Flyby Now Just a Month Away, as NASA Generates Public Interaction
ByNASA's countdown to the New Horizons flyby of Pluto has reached one month and 20 million miles.
According to the Associated Press, the length remaining on New Horizons' trek is less than the distance between Earth and Venus at their closest point in orbit. While NASA has experienced success with several flybys before, this one may be the most significant because it is a far out in the solar system as the space agency can go.
"Every day we break a new distance record to Pluto, and every day our data get better," Alan Stern, New Horizons' Principal Investigator of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a press release. "Nothing like this kind of frontier, outer solar system exploration has happened since Voyager 2 was at Neptune way back in 1989. It's excitin - come and watch as New Horizons turns points of light into a newly explored planetary system and its moons!"
The spacecraft has traveled three billion miles over the course nine years and is scheduled for its flyby with the dwarf planet on July 14. To prepare, NASA is aiming to get the general public involved in similar ways to when Cassini snapped the Earth's picture from behind Saturn.
NASA set up a webpage to allow users to enter their location on Earth in order to find out the time of day at which Pluto will be as bright as it is there. As CNET noted, Simulation Curriculum Corp. also developed a mobile app called Pluto Safari designed to provide information on the New Horizons mission.
NASA has also released a schedule of media events planned to cover the historic flyby.
"This is one charged-up team," Stern told the AP. "We're going to turn a point of light into a planet and its moons overnight in the next month."