New Horizons Closing for July Flyby

I know I am being a bit redundant   -  but you have to admit that as far as NASA's New Horizons mission is concerned  -  It is  starting to heat up in the coldest part of the solar system.

NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft is nearing its History making July 14 Encounter with Pluto, giving us up close data that here to fore has been from ground based and Earth orbiting space observations.

This means that the New Horizons spacecraft will be sending back  first-ever close up images  of distant Pluto and its moons.

New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched, has traveled a longer time and farther away – more than nine years and three billion miles – than any space mission in history to reach its primary target. (voyager may have traveled further but had completed its mission and reached it primary target decades ago)

Its flyby of Pluto on July 14 will complete its primary mission, but may also open the door to new data in the Kuiper Belt, a large area beyond Neptune’s orbit with with numerous and interesting objects.

Interestingly, even with New Horizons closer to Pluto than the Earth is to the Sun, the Pluto system resembles little more than bright dots in the distance. That's enough however for the team team operating the spacecraft to  navigate New Horizons toward a  target 7,750 miles from Pluto’s surface. This is critical, since the craft's computer can not receive commands in real time and it needs to know where to  point its science instruments as it  passes Pluto.

Another real interesting data point:  New Horizons’s work doesn’t end with the flyby. Because its time close to Pluto is so short, New Horizons is designed to gather as much data as it can, as quickly as it can,which means, taking about 100 times as much data on close approach as it can send home before flying away.  The spacecraft will send the data stored in onboard memory for a full 16 months after close approach.

For more on the New Horizons mission, here is the NASA link http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

Did a Hypernova Cause a Mass Extinction Event?

Now here is something interesting in an article I read on the IO9 blog. The article asks the question: Was an exploding star responsible for one of Earth's a mass extinctions" As attractive as it might be, there really is not a way to prove the supposition.

One event is question is particularly troubling: The Ordovician Extinction of 450 million years ago. Though not as famous as the K-T event which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago:

• the Ordovician was still plenty bad, driving more than 60% of all marine species extinct and since nearly all complex life still lived in the sea back then, that was particularly devastating

The really weird thing about the Ordovician event is that it was made up of two separate extinction events, the first was most likely caused by massive volcanic activity, but the second, a million years later: 

• defies easy explanation, and the quest to explain this mystery has led a small group of scientists to put forward a radical hypothesis: it was all caused by a gamma-ray burst. Specifically, this burst must have come from a massive stellar explosion known as a hypernova - an explosion at least a hundred times more powerful than the average supernova - that happened about a thousand light-years away.

Physicist Wilfred Domainko  says that the gamma-ray burst most likely came from a globular cluster.  Now that would be convenient because one of the jobs of the Gaia Star-Mapper, a European Space Agency probe due to start work in 2013, will be among other things, plotting globular clusters with hopes of finding one that may have been close enough in the distant past to have caused the Ordovician extinction even.

This article is really fascinating as well as having links to other article.  You can read the complete article on IO9  HERE