NASA’s New Horizons
Team Calls for the Amateur Astronomical Community to Augment the Mission’s
Observations of Uranus and Neptune
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft plans to observe Uranus
and Neptune from its location far out in the outer solar system this fall, and
the mission team is inviting the global amateur astronomy community to come
along for the ride – and make a real contribution to space science – by
observing both ice giants at the same time.
Amateur astronomers have supported
outer planet observing campaigns before, producing useful data. This GIF
animation from images taken by Marc Delcroix and François Colas at the Pic du
Midi telescope in the French Pyrénées, shows movement of the bright spot as
Uranus rotated over two hours on Oct. 4, 2014.
In September – in
tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope – New Horizons will turn its color
camera toward Uranus and Neptune. From New Horizons’ position in the Kuiper
Belt, more than 5 billion miles from Earth, these unique images acquired from
“behind” the two giant planets will provide new insights into the atmospheres
above and the energy balance within both worlds.
“By combining the information New Horizons
collects in space with data from telescopes on Earth, we can supplement and
even strengthen our models to uncover the mysteries swirling in the atmospheres
of Uranus and Neptune,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator
from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Even from amateur
astronomer telescopes as small as 16 inches, these complementary observations
can be extremely important.”
With New Horizons and Hubble focused on
the details of the planets' atmospheres and the transfer of heat from their
rocky cores through their gaseous exteriors, observers on Earth can measure the
distribution of bright features on Uranus or characterize any unusually bright
features on Neptune. They can also track those features much longer than either
spacecraft.
Following the campaign, observers can post
their images – as well as the details of when they were made and in what filter
passbands -- on X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook using the hashtag #NHIceGiants.
The New Horizons team will see and collect the images and supporting
information placed on these platforms using this identifying
hashtag.
Full details on the campaign – including
finder charts and observation tables – are available on the New Horizons
website at (URL to come).
Images of Uranus (below) taken by
Anthony Wesley of Murrumbateman, Australia with a 16″ Newtonian telescope with
a 650-850nm filter and PGR GS3-U3-23S6M camera, show the dramatic appearance of
a bright storm on a planet that normally displays only a diffuse bright polar
region.
The Hubble images
of Uranus and Neptune will be made publicly available in late September on the
Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, at
archive.stsci.edu. The New Horizons team expects to receive the
images of Uranus and Neptune from the spacecraft by the end of 2023 and will
make them available as well.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons
spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
Southwest Research Institute, in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the
mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern, and leads the science team,
payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the
New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Alabama.
Follow New Horizons on its incredible voyage at http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.
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