New Horizons is currently closing in on its historic meeting with Pluto, the dwarf planet situated at the very edge of our Solar System, and now a new app will let you follow its progress right on your smartphone or tablet.
New Horizons will make the first ever flyby of Pluto on July 14, flying past the dwarf planet while coming within 7,800 miles of its surface. The Pluto Safari app, which was released last month, keeps tabs on New Horizons and even features a countdown to the very second of its upcoming encounter, while at the same time teaching users about the cold, distant body orbiting our Sun. Pluto Safari is available for free for both Apple and Android devices.
"We didn't want to put a price on it, because we wanted to get it in the hands of as many people as we could," says Pedro Braganca of Simulation Curriculum Corp., which developed the app.
New Horizons' flyby "will be an incredible achievement," Braganca says. "So we wanted to sort of capture that moment, and help to draw people to feel excited about this mission."
Pluto was only first discovered in 1930, and since that time has remained a mystery due to its small size and distance of 3.65 billion miles from the Sun. Pluto is the last of the original nine planets to be visited by a spacecraft and represents one of the last frontiers of our solar system that has yet to be explored.
New Horizons "is going to give us our first clear look at this world and its moons," Braganca says. "It doesn't get more exciting than that."
The new app provides interactive views of the current locations of Pluto and even lets users explore a 3D model of both the spacecraft and the Pluto system including its five moons.
Pluto is no longer recognized as a planet after being demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union. That decision remains controversial to this day and the app even provides a poll to see what users think about that decision.
The New Horizons mission won't end with the flyby of Pluto. It will continue to send data back to Earth for at least a year and could even visit another body beyond Pluto in 2019 if the proposal for its extended mission is approved. However, the historic flyby of Pluto is just over a month away and represents one of the last frontiers filled with untapped exploration opportunities for humans.
