Submission + - Beware the Moons of Pluto
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "After completing nearly two-thirds of its journey to Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft is still alive and well but when the spacecraft reaches its goal in July 2015, it may find the region around the dwarf planet more hazardous than anticipated with the recent discovery of several moons around Pluto — and the potential for other, hidden moons too small and faint to detect. Pluto's first known moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978, Hubble Space Telescope discovered two more in 2005, and in July, 2011 a fourth moon was located, leading scientists to believe there may be more. The danger to the spacecraft is debris because the small moons are under constant bombardment from the Kuiper Belt, but the moons' low gravity prevents the chunks of rock from the resulting collisions from being captured so they are caught in orbit around Pluto. "The most likely problem we would encounter is to be hit by something that is large enough to instantly destroy the spacecraft," says New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. Experts recently convened to analyze the hazards and determined the need for a good "safe haven bailout trajectory," or SHBOT — an orbit that New Horizons could shift into that would keep it away from the most likely danger zones and one good trajectory for the fly-by is about 180 degrees away from Charon on closest-approach day because Charon’s gravity clears out the region close to it of debris, creating a safe zone. "There is no wounded here," says Stern, "only dead or alive.""
