The public has until
Friday, April 24 to help name new features on Pluto and its orbiting satellites as they are discovered by NASA’s New Horizons mission.
Announced in March, the agency wants to give the worldwide public
more time to participate in the agency’s mission to Pluto that will make
the first-ever close flyby of the dwarf planet on
July 14.
The campaign extension, in partnership with the International
Astronomical Union (IAU) in Paris, was due to the overwhelming response
from the public.
“Due to increasing interest and the number of submissions we’re
getting, it was clear we needed to extend this public outreach
activity,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division
at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This campaign not only
reveals the public’s excitement about the mission, but helps the team,
which will not have time to come up with names during the flyby, to have
a ready-made library of names in advance to officially submit to the
IAU.”
The IAU is the formal authority for naming celestial bodies.
Submissions must follow a set of accepted themes and guidelines set out
by the IAU’s Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. After the
campaign concludes, NASA’s New Horizons team will sort through the names
and submit its recommendations to the IAU. The IAU will decide whether
and how the names will be used.
The campaign allows the public of all ages to submit names for the
many new features scientists expect to discover on Pluto following the
encounter.
"I’m impressed with the more than 40,000 thoughtful submissions,”
said Mark Showalter, scientist New Horizons science team
co-investigator, and SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, which
is hosting the naming website. “Every day brings new lessons in the
world's history, literature and mythology. Participation has come from
nearly every country on Earth, so this really is a worldwide campaign.”
New Horizons already has covered more than 3 billion miles since it
launched on Jan. 19, 2006. Its journey has taken it past each planet’s
orbit, from Mars to Neptune, in record time, and now it’s now in the
first stage of an historic encounter with Pluto that includes
long-distance imaging, as well as dust, energetic particle and solar
wind measurements to characterize the space environment near Pluto.
The spacecraft will pass Pluto at a speed of 31,000 mph taking
thousands of images and making a wide range of science observations. At a
distance of nearly 4 billion miles from Earth at flyby, it will take
approximately 4.5 hours for data to reach Earth.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) manages the New
Horizons mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), is the principal
investigator. SwRI leads the science team, payload operations and
encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers
Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Alabama. APL designed, built and operates the spacecraft for NASA.
To find out more information about how to participate in the Pluto naming contest, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/
newhorizons