A Great Start to the Space Year

2018 was a great year for space, but it was barely a few days into 2019 and three amazing achievements in space have happened. We had new Horizons studying the furthest object studied in space, the Chinese space agency landing a rover on the far side of the Moon, and OSIRIS-REx mission reached bennu.

New Horizons

By far the biggest news in the space sector recently, New Horizons officially flew by object 2014 MU69, the outermost close encounter of any Solar System object. Launching in 2016, New Horizons was a mission designed to help us understand the worlds at the edge of our Solar System. The biggest part of the mission was in 2015 when it made the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto, producing some amazing photos. After that it kept venturing out into the Kuiper Belt to study more mysterious objects. The spacecraft is helping us to understand the basic questions about the surface properties, interior makeup, geology and atmosphere of the bodies it passes. The exploration of the Kuiper belt is one of the big priorities in planetary science currently. New Horizons fits into this plan, by seeing how Pluto and its Moons “fit in” to the other objects in the Solar System. It has already aided in finding four previously unknown Moons of Pluto, and studied the known Moon Charon in much more detail.

New Horizons Artist
An artistic impression of what New Horizons looked like when it passed Pluto and Charon. Credit: NASA Goddard Media Studios.

New Horizons was designed, built and is operated by The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado is the principal investigator. It flew by the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 barely a few hours into the new year at 05:33 UTC on January 1st 2019. The flyby technically ends on January 9th, where it switches from 3-axis mode to spin mode. This is the beginning of the downlink phase which could run for around 18 months! This is because it is so far away, the frequency (and therefore the data rate) is much lower than if the spacecraft was close. The current extended mission is planned to last until April 30th, 2021. If still operational there may be a new extended mission, but it has very limited fuel at about 11kg. The craft could in theory visit another Kuiper Belt object. If it lasts until the mid 2030’s it will join Voyager 2 in the Heliosphere, but based on the RTG it may run out about then.

Ultima Thule
Image of 2014 MU69, taken 30 minutes before closest approach from a distance of 28,000 km (17,000 mi). Credit: NASA/John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.


On January 3rd 2019 at 02:26 UTC China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft successfully landed on the far side of the Moon. The first ever soft landing on the far side of the Moon, up until this point we only has remotely sensed images. The target of the spacecraft was the Von Kármán crater, located within the South Pole-Aitken basin. This is where an ancient lunar impact may have exposed some of the Moon’s mantle. The plan is to study this region directly with the rover and the lander. It also allows for a close up look at the far side of the Moon, which could be a perfect place for science applications such as radio astronomy. As there is no direct line of sight to the far side of the Moon they need a relay satellite. The satellite that China launched is the Queqiao relay satellite, launched in May 2018.

An image of the rover similar to the Chang’e-3’s rover. Credit: CNSA.


Coming into the new year, on December 31st OSIRIS-REx entered orbit around Bennu. The orbit is at around 1.75 km (just over a mile), and is the place it will be doing an extensive remote sensing campaign. 101955 Bennu, or 1999 RQ36, is a carbonaceous asteroid in the Apollo group. Discovered in 1999, it has a 1 in 2700 chance of impacting Earth between 2175 and 2199. The name Bennu references the Egyptian mythological bird associated with the sun, creation and rebirth. The OSIRIS-REx mission is a sample return mission to the asteroid Bennu. Its goal is to obtain a sample of at least 60g and then bring that sample back to Earth for scientific study. The aim is to help scientists to learn about the formation and evolution of Solar System in its initial stages of planet formation and the source of organic compounds that eventually lead to life. If the mission is successful on September 24th 2023 it will be the first US spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid.

Asteroid Bennu, imaged by the OSIRIS-REx probe (3 December 2018). Credit: NASA/ Goddard/ University of Arizona.

Thank you for reading, take a look at my other posts if you are interested in space, electronics, or military history. If you are interested, follow me on Twitter to get updates on projects I am currently working on. Most of all, thank you for taking the time to read my posts this year! So all have a Happy New Year, and here’s to a great 2019 in space!

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The Geeky Geological Features of Charon


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Charon Enhanced








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Charon: The Man Who Gave His Wife a Moon

Charon Enhanced

On June 22nd, 1978 James Christy was trying to refine the orbit of Pluto when he noticed something odd about the images. Going straight to Robert Harrington, his supervisor at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, together they concluded that they had found what we now know as Pluto’s largest moon Charon. Discovered just 6 miles away from where pluto itself was found (Lowell Observatory), discovering Charon began a journey from Pluto being a dot on a telescope to its own planetary system. With some amazing images coming from a probe NASA sent there, we have a glimpse of the edge of our solar system. The best part of the story, Charon is named after Christy’s wife.

40 years after christy
40 years on, Christy shows the images he used to discover Charon, and now one of the New Horizons images is his PC wallpaper. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Art Howard/GHSPi

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, and although famous in itself, there was limited study on this dot in the far reaches of the solar system. So on the fateful day James Christy asked his supervisor Bob Harrington for something to do, Harrington pulled some telescope plates of Pluto from the Naval Observatory at Flagstaff to look over. Christy looked over them for some time under a microscope and noticed some inconsistencies with the images, with the asymmetry being different between them. In simple terms he noticed a bump on the side of Pluto that seemed to move over time. Although at first he thought he might be seeing things, when he took it to Harrington he agreed with the findings.

Jim Christy points
Jim Christy pointing to the photographic plate that he used to discover that Pluto has a moon. Credit: U.S. Naval Observatory

When  looking at other images of Pluto, the bump was constantly moving from one side to the other. Further examination showed the bump moved around Pluto at the same own rotational period, 6.39 days. There were two potential theories as to what it was, either Pluto had a mountain thousands of miles high (meaning Pluto was not very spherical) or it has a satellite in synchronous orbit. In the 48 years since Pluto’s discovery at Lovell Observatory in 1930, there had never been any evidence spotted that Pluto had a moon. The next steps included scouring the archives for more cases of an elongated looking Pluto.

The Charon images
The discovery at the US Naval Observatory, Flagstaff was seen as a time varying bulge on the image of Pluto. This is a negative version of the one Christy looked at. Credit: US Naval Observatory.

Christy measured the angle from the north where the strange elongation was. At the same time Robert Harrington calculated what the answer would be if the elongation was from a satellite. They then compared their results, and they were the same. To be sure they waited for the Observatories 61 inch telescope to make a final confirmation on the matter. On the 2nd of July 1978 new images showed an elongation exactly where they expected it to be. Five days later they announced the discovery to the world. Pluto’s first satellite had been discovered.

40 years difference
The difference of 40 years, top left is one of the images Christy used to discover Cahron, the big image is from New Horizons flyby. Credit: U.S. Naval Observatory; NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

By astronomical tradition, the discoverer of an object gets the first chance to suggest a name for the object. The name does not have to be recognised by the International Astronomers Union. Christy wanted to name the moon after his wife, Charlene. To make it sound more scientific he took his nickname for her “Char” and added an “on”. The “on” was from his interest in atoms, and words like proton and neutron. He suggested the name on the June 24th, 1978. Colleagues at the observatory prefered the name Persephone, but Christy noticed that Charon was actually a real Greek mythological figure. Charon is the ferryman of the dead, associated with the god Hades. Creepily the Romans identified Hades with their god Pluto. The name was eventually adopted on January the 3rd 1986.

The greek Charon
The name Charon was partially adopted because it is the name of the ferrymen of the dead in greek mythology. this is a nineteenth century painting by Alexander Litovchenko

Charon is the largest moon of Pluto, and is about the size of Texas. It also makes Charon the largest moon relative to its parent planet at about 12% of the size. So big in fact that Charon and Pluto are seen as a double planet or binary planets. They have a common centre of gravity that is outside of either of them. It is believed that it was formed by some sort of giant impact, much like the Earth and the Moon. The sheer size and proximity to Pluto meant it was a good choice for a scientific mission to take a closer look at the system. The mission, New Horizons was launched in 2006, with a  primary mission to performa flyby study of the Pluto system.

New Horizons Artist

Passing about 18,000 miles (29,000 km) away from Charon on the 24th of July 2015, New Horizons gave the world a brand new stunning view of the moon from up close. At its closest point it was 7,800 miles (12,500 km) from Pluto, mapping both the planet and the moon using its long range imaging cameras. It mapped them to a resolution of 25 mi (40 km). The way they entered the system and the speed they were going allowed them to map all sides of both bodies. They took multiple images with the close range camera to find any surface changes. They also characterised the atmosphere, using the on board ALICE experiment.

Best Charon Images
A mosaic of the best images taken by New Horizons of Charon, from a few different angles. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The science gained by New Horizons has given astronomers a new look into the outer reaches of the solar system, and it is still planning to take more images of comets and asteroids it comes into contact with in 2019. The first close up images of Charon were revealed  to the world at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland to a packet auditorium. Jim Christy, the discoverer of Charon and his wife who it was named after were there at the unveiling, were recognized by the crowd. He said “When you go from this little blur in which you don’t actually see anything, to the enormous detail New Horizons sent back,” Christy said, “it’s incredible.” That amount of change in just 40 years.