Pluto on the Eve of New Horizons: Webcast tonight

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2013/07/23 08:37 CDT

Topics: events and announcements, New Horizons

I'm off for the airport to fly to the East Coast to participate in the scientific conference "The Pluto System on the Eve of Exploration by New Horizons." The conference began yesterday, and attendees have been Tweeting up a storm using the hashtag #plutosci. I'll arrive this evening just in time for New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern's public talk, which will be webcast if you'd like to watch and listen too!

Excitement is really building for New Horizons' encounter with Pluto, which will culminate in July 2015 but which will really span the entire year. At this conference, scientists are taking stock of what we've learned from 83 years of scientific observation. As rich as New Horizons' data set will be, it'll be much more powerful because of the context it's being placed into.

Watch this space for blog entries about the current state of Pluto science!

Dan Durda, SwRI

New Horizons at Pluto, July 2015

Artist's concept of New Horizons as it reaches Pluto.

New Horizons Science Overview

New Horizons will spend most of 2015 training its package of seven imagers, spectrometers, and in situ plasma instruments on the Pluto system.

Comments:

Joseph Moran: 07/23/2013 03:15 CDT

"New Horizons to Planet Pluto: Exploring the Frontier of Our Solar System." I see what they did there.

K C: 07/24/2013 10:23 CDT

Dr. Stern's lecture was very interesting and informative. One item I have a question about is when he mentioned that the magnetic field was studied during the Jupiter encounter. Since New Horizons lacks a magnetometer, how was that achieved? Was it measured indirectly by observing how the charged particles were accelerated using the Pepsi and SWAP instruments?

Emily Lakdawalla: 08/05/2013 05:22 CDT

Yes, that's how they did it.