After a 9-Year Voyage, New Horizons Will Have Minutes to Measure Pluto’s Atmosphere

The brief encounter will generate so much data it’ll take more than a year to send it all back
Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Long Way From Home: New Horizons will use radio waves from Earth to analyze Pluto’s atmosphere.
In a few short weeks, the NASA New Horizons spacecraft will finish a long, lonely trek through the outer solar system and zip past Pluto. It will gather the first close-up views of the erstwhile ninth planet and examine, among other things, Pluto’s thin atmosphere by measuring sunlight and radio waves that pass through it.
The 14 July encounter has been a long time in the making. It has taken New Horizons more than nine years to make its way from Earth to Pluto, which was demoted and reclassified by the International Astronomical Union as a “dwarf planet” while the spacecraft was en route.
The US $700 million mission has fared well so far, hibernating for long stretches along the way. But much of New Horizons’ success will hinge on a few short hours around its closest approach, when the probe will thread between Pluto and the orbit of its innermost moon, Charon, pass some 12,500 kilometers above Pluto’s surface, and cross into the shadow cast by the dwarf planet.

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