The New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission - arXiv:1806.08393

Paper: The New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission 
Authors: S.A. Stern, H.A. Weaver, J.R. Spencer, H.A. Elliott, the New Horizons Team
Abstract: The central objective of the New Horizons prime mission was to make the first exploration of Pluto and its system of moons. Following that, New Horizons has been approved for its first extended mission, which has the objectives of extensively studying the Kuiper Belt environment, observing numerous Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and Centaurs in unique ways, and making the first close flyby of the KBO 486958 2014 MU69. This review summarizes the objectives and plans for this approved mission extension, and briefly looks forward to potential objectives for subsequent extended missions by New Horizons.

My Comment: Two and a half days before closest encounter, the extended mission target 2014 MU69 will finally be 2 pixels on the LORRI instrument. That's um... rather quick!

My Scrawling Notes:

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A year long Curiosity

Just a few quick thoughts.  This week marks the one year anniversary of the Mars Science Laboratory Rover, Curiosity, landing in Gale Crater on the surface of Mars.  A year ago we deposited a ton of nuclear-powered robot on the surface of another world. 

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Since then it is have been roving, scooping, dusting, vaporizing rocks, and just sciencing the heck out of the red planet.  36,700 images, 76,000 rock-zapping laser shots, and 1.6 kilometers driven so far.  It still has about an 8 km drive to go to get to the lower layers of the 5.5 km tall Mt. Sharp.  Just in it’s first year Curiosity has already a world that looks downright “habitable” in the distant past – spectacularly finding the remains of a pebbled riverbed.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / PSI

So happy “birthday” to the MSL Rover Curiosity – may there be many more rocks to bother in your future.

Houston, Futura has landed.

I generally get a kick out of looking at the evidence of humanity that we have thrown around the Solar System, so with the Apollo 11 Moon landing anniversary just past I thought I would look at the the first words brought to the Moon by it – the Apollo 11 Lunar plaque.

Like all of the Lunar plaques brought by the Apollo missions this is a 9” x 7 5/8” stainless steel plaque, attached to the Lunar Module’s ladder.  It features the signatures of the three astronauts, the President on the United States, and a message of peace.  Classy look message eh?  You might recognize the lettering from the titles of Stanley Kubrick’s films, or more recently Wes Anderson’s work.  Like the Saturn V rockets that carried men to the moon, the font on the plaques they brought with them, Futura, was designed by a German.

Futura was designed by Paul Renner, and release to the public in 1927.  It’s a very clean geometric font.  No extra serifs, frills, or decorations are found. Now, I’m not a font expert by any means so I can’t go into the details of what exactly sets Futura apart from other fonts of the time, and how the various child-fonts it has spawned  differ from each other.  What I can say is that despite being a 86 year old typeface it still, to me at least, looks to the future, a future perhaps when the Apollo 17 plaque won’t be the last words we left on the Moon.



Right now this 41 year old plaque from Apollo 17 in an 86 year old typeface are the last words humanity personally left behind on the Moon.

Yes Virginia, you can see the flags on the Moon!

One of the all-time questions that people ask about any big telescope is “can you see the flags on the Moon?”  The answer for all ground based, and Earth orbiting (e.g the. Hubble Space Telescope) is no for a variety of reasons: too small at that distance, on too bright of a surface, etc.  In fact the Hubble website has this question (with answer)  in their FAQ!  With the fantastic images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) in Lunar orbit however, we can indeed see many of the objects left behind by the Apollo astronauts.  The landers, footpaths, rovers, and science experiments are all visible in amazing detail.  For example, below is a recent LROC image of the Apollo 11 landing site at the Sea of Tranquility.

LROC image credit NASA / GSFC / ASU 

But what about the flags?  Now in many of the images there seems to be something around where the flags were planted, but it’s really tough to tell anything about them from a single image.  Even with shadows, it is hard to make out if the shadow is from the flag, or from the flagpole!  Quite a number of people, myself included, have postulated that the flags on the Moon have deteriorated away during the 4+ decades that these flags have been there.  Harsh UV, charged particle, and micrometeorite bombardment – all things that our atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from – might have easily destroyed a standard nylon flag, which indeed was all that the Apollo flags were.

That said, you can indeed make out the “flag” site of most of the Apollo landings in the LROC images, and something is there!  But are they the flags, or just the poles with a pile of nylon dust?  A recent round of LROC observations has answered that question:  Despite my pessimism on their survivability, the flags are still there.  Having now observed the landing sites at many angles, the LROC team has been able to look at the shadows cast by the flags, and those shadows not only match those expected by a flag+pole, but change orientation with the sun from image to image!  Below is a recent image of the Apollo 17 site, along with a blow-up of the portion with the descent stage and flag – that shadow is certainly more than just the pole!

LROC image credit NASA / GSFC / ASU

The LROC team has also made an animation out of the still images of the Apollo 12 site, you can watch the shadows move around during a “lunar day” reconstructed from the LROC observations:

Ok, to be fair, the flags might not be intact.  While we can now see that they are still standing, the 40+ years they’ve spent on the Moon may have “bleached” out their colors, but it’s still pretty flipping cool that 5 out of 6 Apollo Flags have been found.  Buzz Aldrin mentioned that he thought he saw the flag get knocked over as he and Neil Armstrong took off from the Moon, and what do you know, he was right.  The only Apollo flag not identified in the LROC images is Apollo 11’s.

Flag Day - The Updating!

Turns out I’ve already got an update to my Flag Day! post from a little bit ago.  I had speculated that like Pathfinder, the flag decals on the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were under the camera-mast, and thus not imaged by the rovers.  Boy was I wrong!

Here’s the flag on the instrument deployment device (IDD), the rover’s “arm” on Opportunity.  All that dust on the instrument is left over from using its rock abrasion tool (sort of a grinder/drill) on the exposed rocks during Opportunity’s 31^st Martial day.

I also missed an obvious “2-fer” on Spirit!  Beyond the decal on the IDD, Spirit also carried with it a memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia, STS-107. 

The above memorial plaque carries the US flag, along with the names of the Astronauts who were lost on the Columbia.  If you look closely you can see an additional Israeli flag next to the name of Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut.

As a bonus here’s a shot of the first “nationally branded” object deployed to the surface of the Moon

These two steel spheres (diameters 7.5 and 12 cm respectively) were carried to the Moon by the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 spacecraft.  Each of these spheres was filled with a an explosive designed to fragment them like a very large grenade, showering the Lunar surface with the little pentagonal pennants that the spheres were crafted out of.  It is really unlikely that any of these little medals survived.  On September 13, 1959 Luna-2 didn’t land gently on the Moon, but rather plowed into it at over 3 km/s.  The energy generated by the impact of a 400kg spacecraft at the speed would generate enough heat to vaporize steel.  One of the ideas behind the explosives inside the spheres was to try and remove some of the impact velocity, and thus allow at least some of them to survive.  It’s possible but, in my opinion, unlikely that they made it through the impact intact.

The first Soviet Moon probe, Luna-1, also carried a similar sphere, but missed the moon (Luna-1 passed within 6,000 km of the Moon on January 4, 1959), and is now in a 450 day orbit about the Sun.

Flag Day!

For Flag Day I pulled out a few extraterrestrial flags that humans have placed on other worlds.

On The Moon: 

Have to start off with the big one, Apollo 11’s flag.  The flags placed by the Apollo astronauts remain the only flags ever planted on the surface of another world by a human being.  Also they are the only ones actually on flag poles!  Whether these flags are still around today is debatable – a number of them were knocked over during lift-off of the Lunar Excursion Module’s (LEM) Ascent stage, as they were placed too close to the LEM.  Buzz Aldrin has mentioned that he saw the flag get knocked over when he and Neil Armstrong left the Moon.

This blurry image is a screen capture I made from of video footage from the video camera left behind on the Moon after Apollo 17 left.  In this case the flag remained standing, and can be seen as the blurry rectangle on the right of the image.  Even that flag however may not really be in that great of shape.  For 40 years they have been exposed to the extreme day/night heating cycles of the Moon, vicious UV light from the Sun, and potentially micrometeoritic bombardment, if the fabric is still there at all it may very well be essentially bleached white!

More flags than just the US flag are on the Moon.  In the above image from the Soviet Union’s Luna 17 Lander (bringing with it the Lunokhod Rover).  The Soviet Union’s flag can bee seen on the right hand side of the image.

While not a soft landing, India’s flag arrived on the moon on the side of the Moon Impact Probe, from the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter.  Japan and China both have also had “hard” landings on the Moon – but I haven’t been able to track down a clear image of national flags on either Japan’s Hiten and Selene/Kaguya probes, or on China’s Chang'e 1.

On Mars

Moving even further away from Earth, here is the flag carried on the body of the Viking 2 Lander on the surface of Mars.  The Viking probes were a pair of orbiter and lander probes that pretty much were the backbone of Mars data until the 1990’s.

In the mid 1990’s, Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars with the flag decal seen above in this pre launch image, but to my knowledge there are no images of the flag on Mars since the camera mast was above the decal and couldn’t see it.  I think the same is true for the Mars Expedition Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity

The Phoenix Mars Lander was able to include this flag here while taking images of the polar regions of Mars where it landed in 2008.

On Venus:

No images of the Soviet Union's flag itself from the surface of Venus, but here it is painted on the side of the Venera 13 Lander, which would eventually land on Venus in 1982, and managed to operate for 127 minutes (about 4 times longer than planned!) in the harsh (460C/900F and 90ATM) condition on the surface of Venus.

And beyond…

Finally, while this flag did not end up on the surface of any world, I think it deserves a bit of special mention here.  This is John Casani, Voyager Project Manager, holding a small flag that was to be folded and sewn into the thermal blankets of the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.  The Voyagers are the two most distant objects from Earth ever made by humans (not counting radio signals!) and are now at 18 and 14.7 billion kilometers from Earth.  You can even follow them on twitter – @NASAVoyager2 updates it’s distance and engineering tasks!

I’m still putting together a final collection, a few other probes which may have placed flags on other worlds that I’m interested in finding out about are NEAR Shoemaker (soft-crashed onto asteroid 433 Eros in 2001), Galileo (burned up in Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003).  I don’t think there was a flag on the Deep Impact impactor that collided with comet 9P/Tempel, and my understanding is that ESA doesn’t include national flags on their missions (the Huygens lander on Saturn’s moon Titan for example).  If you’ve got info on these or any others hit me up on twitter @rocksinspace.