Today’s blog is from Dr. Henry Throop, a planetary scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Mumbai, India. He received his PhD in 2000 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His areas of research include the outer solar system, the rings of Jupiter and Saturn, and planet formation in the Orion Nebula. He has been working with the New Horizons mission since 2002.
New Horizons traveled for 9.5 years to get to Pluto. But most of the spacecraft’s key Pluto system observations were taken within a single 24-hour period. How did we make sure that we get the best observations possible — to do the best science in those 24 hours? Well, it took a lot of planning.
When astronomers are using telescopes on the ground, observing is sometimes unplanned, and conditions vary as the night moves along. Perhaps the images from an object are particularly interesting, so we take more. Or the weather is changing, or an instrument is not working right, and we move to a new target or new instrument, improvising along the way.
But for the Pluto encounter, there was no possibility of this. With only a single day to gather the once-in-a-lifetime datasets about this ...