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NASA's New Horizon probe rudely fires its thruster at gnome planet

She's in the pipe, five by five

NASA's New Horizons space probe has fired its thrusters for the last time to get it into position before it buzzes Pluto on July 14. The little science lab has also detected evidence of methane on the halfling planet.

"We are really on the final path," said New Horizons Project Manager Glen Fountain, of APL. "It just gets better and more exciting every day."

Ground controllers squirted hydrazine into the probe's thruster for a 23-second burn that changed its course slightly and sped it up by 27 centimetres per second – a tiny fraction of its 32,500 miles per hour velocity.

The maneuver allows the probe to skim Pluto's surface from 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometres) above its surface, taking photos and readings from the dwarf world. Without the course correction, New Horizons would have been 20 seconds late, and 114 miles (184 kilometres) off the planned route.

"This maneuver was perfectly performed by the spacecraft and its operations team," said mission principal investigator Alan Stern, of Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. "Now we're set to fly right down the middle of the optimal approach corridor."

Ground control is now focused on checking all of the probe's instruments to make sure everything is ready for the flyby. The probe has started taking photographs of the alien world, but the high speed means it will have a very limited period of time to take the close up images that scientists are lusting after.

There's then the tricky problem of getting all that data back. Due to the distances involved, the probe can only manage a data rate of 1Kbps, so it's going to be a while before instrument readings are back on Earth in a usable form.

However, signs of methane have been detected on Pluto by the New Horizons craft.

"We already knew there was methane on Pluto, but these are our first detections," said Will Grundy, the New Horizons Surface Composition team leader with the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

"Soon we will know if there are differences in the presence of methane ice from one part of Pluto to another."

New Horizons now only has 10 million miles (16 million kilometres) to go before it buzzes Pluto. The probe was launched in 2006, and has travelled 2.95 billion miles (4.75 billion kilometres) in that time.

Once past Pluto, the probe will head out further into the Kuiper Belt. NASA is hoping to use it to discover more about the band of icy rocks and planetoids that encircle the Solar System. From there it will join the Voyager probes as a deep space explorer, and is expected to leave the Solar System by 2047. ®

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