Dawn and New Horizons, Missions to Ceres and Pluto

2015 is going to be a historic year for space exploration in this solar system. Two of the upcoming events are happening this month, and in a couple months from now. These two events both are based on dwarf planets. The two dwarf planets, Ceres and Pluto. Ceres is a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt and has a possibility of having underground oceans as well as mysterious bright spot that has dumbfounded astronomers for years, only being able to be hypothesized at what it is. Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system, it has a moon that is almost the same mass as it, Charon. Pluto also is the anchor to four other moons not including Charon.

The 9 year journey that started in 2006, was the launch of the New Horizons probe which was launched into its trajectory to do a flyby of Pluto. This is a feat that has not been done ever. For the first time since its discovery in 1930, humankind will be able to finally see Pluto. This dwarf planet(classified as one in 2006), is too far away to be seen with telescopes, and telescopes such as the Hubble space telescope could not see it due to it’s tiny size. The New Horizons probe has already surpassed Hubble’s image of the dwarf planet, but the most important month for New Horizons will be July 2015. The probe will do its closest flyby and be able to take pictures of Pluto with a resolution of .05km/pixel. That is a great resolution for a celestial body and it will be able to learn much from these pictures.

Ceres and the Dawn spacecraft started its journey in 2007 and is starting to get into a stable orbit right now. Very detailed pictures will start to arise in the month of June, which will be when Dawn is mapping the dwarf planet. The best pictures of Ceres will be seen in August- December 2015 when the probe will be spiraling down to an orbit of 375 km which will be the probes final orbit and the orbit at the end of its mission.