The New Horizons team got a faint glimpse of the mission's distant, main planetary target when one of the spacecraft's telescopic cameras spotted Pluto for the first time. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took the pictures during an optical navigation test on Sept. 21-24, and stored them on the spacecraft's data recorder until their recent transmission back to Earth.
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Seen at a distance of about 4.2 billion kilometers (2.6 billion miles) from the spacecraft, Pluto is little more than a faint point of light among a dense field of stars. But the images prove that the spacecraft can find and track long-range targets, a critical capability the team will use to navigate New Horizons toward 2,500-kilometer wide Pluto and, later, one or more 50-kilometer sized Kuiper Belt objects.
Mission scientists knew they had Pluto in their sights when LORRI detected an unresolved "point" in Pluto's predicted position, moving at the planet's expected motion across the constellation of Sagittarius near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.
Pluto appears in all three images of that region of space LORRI photographed on Sept. 21 and Sept. 24, confirming that it was "real" and not a cosmic ray or other object. For further confirmation, the object moving along Pluto's predicted path in the sky has a visual magnitude (brightness) a little brighter than 14, just what could be expected from Pluto at that time and that distance from New Horizons.
To analyze the images for their moving target, the team actually pulled a page out of Clyde Tombaugh's Pluto discovery book, stroboscopically switching between multiple images of the same area taken days apart. Using this technique, objects such as stars appear stationary, but moving targets, such as a planet, are easily seen jumping between positions against the star field.
"Finding Pluto in this dense star field really was like trying to find a needle in a haystack," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute.
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