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On May 11, the first spacecraft ever to visit Pluto will begin looking for tiny debris as it approaches the dwarf planet at 48,000 kph:
To minimize the risk of hitting debris from Charon or another, unknown moon, scientists will conduct seven 45-minute observation sessions between 11 May and 1 July. If they find a potential hazard, the team can change the spacecraft's course.
...The mission is almost certain to discover new moons in the process. The Hubble Space Telescope found two during its hazard searches before the Pluto mission: Kerberos, which measures 14-40 kilometres across, in 2011, and the smaller Styx in 2012.
If something dangerous is spotted, 4 July is the last chance to divert the spacecraft to one of three available alternate routes.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday May 11 2015, @12:39PM
So when will we get pictures from Pluto?
And at which url?
Optimistically I'm hoping for a story here on SN on the morning of July 14th (at least in USA timezones) aka arrival day.
Going for the funny mod, we might not see an article here till late July etc ha ha ha.
I am seriously considering blowing a vacation day to sit at home and watch NASA TV online streams all day. However I have a bad feeling if I blow a vacation day:
1) NASA tv will be dead from the load, in fact anything worth watching will be dead other than judge judy day time talk shows. I can't imagine the fox news spin for 80 year old angry white men (BREAKING NEWS BREAKING NEWS NASA wasted billions of your job creator tax dollars to get one pix of Pluto not knowing Disney has hundreds of hours of footage of Pluto with Mickey Mouse, also this is proof gay marriage destroys civilization, those $@^ democrats)
2) If I use up a vacation day that guarantees the thing will bluescreen or otherwise crash and no one will get to see anything at all.
3) Typical NASA behavior, they'll be one artist rendition retouched image released and everything else will be publication embargo'd for a year anyway so they'll be nothing to really see. The one image will be on 5 minute news cycle repeat of administrator babble, show the same photo for 3 seconds, back to babble, repeat endlessly. F that.
Its a mission decades in the making, a historic event, if there was ever a time for science/tech journalism type stuff to get their stuff together, this would be the day to do it.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 11 2015, @05:15PM
July the 14th is the day to find out which sites are newsworthy and what's trash?
NASA TV Satellite feed should work?
Or you could just record everything and see later?
(Score: 2) by hubie on Monday May 11 2015, @05:55PM
In 1989 my friend and I went to a science museum for the Voyager encounter with Neptune so that we could see the live feed on NASA TV (it was the only place we could find that carried the feed). It was fun and exciting to see the imagery come in at the same time mission ops was seeing it. I'm very glad I did it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @09:35AM
There's not going to be any point watching streams. The bandwidth from New Horizons is going to be absolutely pathetic. It'll be slowly, slowly beaming us low res pictures on the day itself, then returning all the real data and the detailed shots over the coming months.
The probe is highly limited by power, distance and antenna design, so don't expect it to host a livestream show.