What Do They Hope To Find On Pluto? 'Well, Plutonians Of Course'
DENVER (CBS4) - It's about six billion miles away, but the New Horizons spacecraft is approaching Pluto for an historic visit, and it has dozens of ties to Colorado.
The spaceship wouldn't even be traveling about a million miles a day if it wasn't launched on the fastest rocket ever invented. Colorado's United Launch Alliance helped with that. But what the project is really about is pictures, and that instrument was built on a tight timeline by Ball Aerospace in Broomfield.
"We here at Ball Aerospace are very proud to be part of this historic trip to Pluto," said Mark Hegge, a mechanical engineer for Ball Aerospace.
It's been 10 years since crews worked on building a visible/infrared imager they named Ralph.
"Ball built the Ralph instrument … it's the primary eyes for the mission, so it will take the first close-up images of Pluto," Hegge said.
It's arguably one of the most important pieces on the piano-sized New Horizons.
"What Ralph will do is take very clear images, very close up of Pluto, so you'll see a lot of detail. In the images we've already seen you can see lots of craters and things that look like cliffs and plateaus and dark spots," Hegge said.
What are scientists hoping to find?
"Well, Plutonians of course," Hegge said.
The camera will shoot in extreme detail even traveling 31,000 miles per hour as it passes by the planet.
"We've never visited Pluto. We've visited every other planet in the solar system. Pluto is last. Really this completes the initial reconnaissance of the solar system."
But while the excitement is building for Tuesday morning's flyby, the findings will take some time.
"New Horizons is our first look into that region of the solar system," Hegge said. "In truth it will take a lot of time for all of these images to trickle down. It's a long way away. It takes 4 1/2 hours for light to travel from our spacecraft to Earth. So that data trickle will be slow."
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science will be showing pictures on a monitor as they become available.