With NASA's New Horizons, Purdue looks to Pluto
- Purdue scientists are anxiously waiting as the New Horizons spacecraft sends us photos from Pluto
- All the data could take a year to arrive because the dwarf planet is 3 billion miles away from Earth
- Professors hope the data will better explain Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and the outer solar system
- Glimpses into Pluto could also help scientists understand the origins of life and our planets
After a successful flyby, Purdue University scientists hope to better understand Pluto as the New Horizons spacecraft beams data back to Earth from the edges of the solar system.
Scientists are already learning from the first close-up image of the dwarf planet, which NASA said was taken about 16 hours before the craft's closest approach. It took nearly a decade to reach the icy world.
"It's amazing, it really is," said David Minton, a professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences. "All your life, you hear about this strange, little world, Pluto, on the outer reaches of the solar system and wonder what it looks like. And finally to get to see it up close — it's one of the more strange and diverse-looking worlds we've ever seen."
Thirteen hours of radio science followed the historic flyby Tuesday morning as the craft rotated toward Pluto and its moons to snap photos, restricting communication. NASA received successful messages at 8:50 p.m, USA TODAY reports.
"The spacecraft is moving pretty fast through the Pluto system — 31,000 mph — and if it were to hit anything — a baseball-size piece of rock — that would be the end of the mission," said professor Jay Melosh, an expert in impact craters.
It was a tense half-day. But perhaps more painstaking is the yearlong wait as data are sent across 3 billion miles at a rate that most smartphone users would find unacceptable, Melosh said. Still, higher resolution photos are expected within a week, he noted.
Melosh said his team of students and researchers hopes to use the photos to determine Pluto's age.
"One thing we do see is impact craters, which is not a terrible surprise, but it's good to see them because it allows us to estimate the age of the surface," he said. "If we know the rate the impacts occur … we can count the number of craters in a given area and figure out roughly how old that surface is."
The craters' shapes also could indicate the thickness of the dwarf planet's ice layers, he noted.
The biggest discoveries, however, could offer a deeper explanation of the origins of life and the solar system. Pluto was famously demoted to a dwarf planet after the discovery of the Kuiper Belt — several icy worlds, including Pluto, that are remnants of "a debris disc from which our planets formed," Minton said.
Pluto also contains leftover organic molecules, such as carbon compounds, from which life originated on Earth, Minton said.
"These Kuiper Belt objects kind of freeze in a fossil record of what the solar system was like before there were planets, before there was life," he said.
Since its discovery, however, the Kuiper Belt and its members have been largely excluded during discussions of the solar system, Minton said.
"The more we can study these types of objects," he said, "the more we're going get a handle on how life in the universe arises and forms and how planets are made."
For those interested in a more personal look at Pluto this weekend, the Indiana Family Star Party promises participants a faint glimpse of the dwarf planet.
The event is billed as Indiana's largest star party and attracts amateur astronomers and families from five states, said Russ Kaspar, co-founder and director of the Prairie Grass Observatory in Clinton County.
"Even with a 28-inch lens — whereas with Saturn, you're going to see the bands and the rings and lots of neat detail — Pluto quite frankly will look like another point of light," Kaspar said. "It will look like a star."
If you go
What: Indiana Family Star Party
When: Beginning at 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Prairie Grass Observatory at Camp Collum, 6815 W. County Road 200 North, Frankfort
Cost: $5 per person, which includes free hot chocolate, coffee and popcorn