A closer look at Pluto | Top Vip News

February 18 will mark 94 years since we learned of the existence of Pluto. Pluto has enjoyed popularity with the public for its entire known existence. From the time it was discovered in 1930 and hailed as the ninth planet, until 2006, when it was demoted to dwarf planet status, and ever since, Pluto has captured the imagination of the masses.

Pluto takes almost 248 years to orbit the Sun and its elongated orbit ensures that it is about 7.3 billion kilometers from the Sun at its farthest point and approaches when it is about 4.4 billion kilometers from it. Since its closest distance to the Sun is very, very far, this Kuiper Belt object is also naturally very distant from Earth.

Until now, in fact, trying to see and resolve the surface of Pluto from Earth is like trying to see the footprint of a ball when it is placed more than 50 km away. Pluto’s disk is so small that it cannot be resolved from below Earth’s atmosphere. We are not just talking about simple vision, but also about using the most powerful ground-based telescopes.

Hubble comes to the rescue

It was a space telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, that allowed the first unobstructed observation of Pluto. Tasked with observing and photographing the planet in June-July 1994 (remember it was still a planet back then), it was assembled and released for public consumption on March 7, 1996.

The Hubble Space Telescope was tasked with capturing Pluto again in 2002-2003. Astronomers had installed a new camera there called the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). This new camera was equipped with an operating mode called High Resolution Camera (HRC). The ACS/HRC system produced 384 images of Pluto, the most detailed set of observations of Pluto ever made.

Scientists and engineers worked on these raw images for years before they were finally released to the public on February 4, 2010. This set of images was, until then, the most detailed ever made of Pluto.

Special algorithms

“This has taken four years and 20 computers running continuously and simultaneously to achieve,” said principal investigator Mark Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, at a NASA news conference that day. Although Buie, who had developed special algorithms to refine Hubble data, expressed this only in a statement at the press conference, he went into more detail by writing about this research project on his website.

While discussing the technique used to get the best out of the raw images, Buie mentions the difficulty of working with the ACS data. The idea is to start with a guess of Pluto’s map and arrive at the best map using the data and a computer.

it all adds up

The dithering process combines multiple slightly offset images to generate a higher resolution view. While this may seem easy, “taking the map and calculating what one The image should be viewed in about 5 seconds on a computer circa 2004.” Since it took five seconds to process an image on one of the most powerful computers of the time, it would take 30 minutes to test a map assumption with all 384 images. Buie realized that, at this rate, he would need 20 years on a computer to come up with an answer.

To overcome this obstacle, Buie came up with a plan by working with a great programmer, Doug Loucks. They maximized computing power using parallel processing. In his plan, there was one computer that worked as a master, gathering all the data and producing the final answer, another that worked as a foreman, listening to the master and handing out tasks to workers who were not busy, and the rest were workers. The computers that served as foremen and workers did not really know what they were doing and were like puppets in the hands of a puppeteer: the master computer.

It still took them years to arrive at the final answer, which they published in February 2010. In addition to being the sharpest images of the dwarf planet until months before the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto in 2015, these images also helped scientists plan that flyby.