Pluto Mission News
28 Nov 2006 5:48:21 UTC
Topic 192128
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November 22, 2006
A Season for Thanksgiving
It's Thanksgiving and I just want to wish everyone a great Thanksgiving holiday. We sure have no shortage of things to be thankful for on this project.
A year ago today we had a spacecraft on the ground in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, a booster rocket with RP-1 tank problems, an autonomy system that was considered fragile, and dozens of other like issues to deal with just to get to launch. In fact, exactly a year ago today, New Horizons project manager Glen Fountain and I were in Daytona and other central Florida locales with KSC folks and New Horizons Program Executive Kurt Lindstrom talking to the editorial board of the local paper to allay concerns about the upcoming January nuclear launch we were planning. Fueling the spacecraft with hydrazine was just around the corner, and we had an appointment at LC-41 just three weeks away. Everything about flight ops seemed impending but somehow theoretical with that big launch of a new Atlas V variant looming in our future.
Today we're 4.4 Astronomical Units from the Sun and 5.3 AU from the good Earth, speeding on to another appointment -- this one at Jupiter -- just under 100 days hence. Our spacecraft is right on course and in fine shape, as is its scientific payload. We have an operations team that has settled in and impressed people across the project and at NASA with their skills. We have more fuel aboard than anyone rightfully deserved to expect, and our spacecraft has flown 300-plus days without a single "Go Safe." And these things just scratch the surface of what we can be thankful for.
So, from the PI to all of you, Happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for all you have done and all you are doing to make this dream mission come true. I hope you all have a great, long weekend with family and friends while New Horizons quietly passes through solar conjunction.
Best Wishes,
Alan Stern
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New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt of rocky, icy objects beyond. Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), leads a mission team that includes the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Ball Aerospace Corporation, the Boeing Company, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford University, KinetX, Inc., Lockheed Martin Corporation, University of Colorado, the U.S. Department of Energy, and a number of other firms, NASA centers and university partners. For more information on the mission, visit http://pluto.jhuapl.edu
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Pluto Mission News
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November 28, 2006
New Horizons Gets First Glimpse of Pluto
The New Horizons team got a faint glimpse of the mission's distant, main planetary target when one of the spacecraft's telescopic cameras spotted Pluto for the first time. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took the pictures during an optical navigation test on Sept. 21-24, and stored them on the spacecraft's data recorder until their recent transmission back to Earth.
Seen at a distance of about 4.2 billion kilometers (about 2.6 billion miles) from the spacecraft, Pluto is little more than a faint point of light in a dense field of stars. But the images prove that New Horizons can find and track long-range targets, a critical capability the team will use to navigate the spacecraft toward Pluto and, later, one or more Kuiper Belt objects.
Visit: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/112806.htm
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Popular Science: New Horizons Among Top Technologies of 2006
Popular Science magazine has put New Horizons on its annual "Best of What’s New" list, which honors the year’s most outstanding breakthrough products and technologies. The mission was among the 100 new products and innovations selected from hundreds examined by the magazine, and one of 12 selected in the Aviation & Space category.
"The New Horizons mission was a clear 'Best of What’s New' winner because it’s the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system with far too many questions and not enough answers," says Michael Moyer, Popular Science executive editor. "In addition, we were impressed by the sheer numbers of the attempt: 36,000 miles per hour [leaving Earth], and a flyby of Jupiter in just over a year after launch."
Read what the magazine has to say about New Horizons at http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2006/product_11.html
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Now Online: The Story of the New Horizons Student Dust Counter
It's a student-made movie about the first student-built instrument on a NASA planetary mission: University of Colorado journalism student David Tauchen documented the development of the New Horizons Student Dust Counter -- now known as "Venetia" -- and turned it into an award-winning short film.
The film, "Destination: Pluto and Beyond," captured a 2006 regional Emmy Award for Student Achievement. You can view it online from the New Horizons Web site at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/videos.php
For more information about the instrument, developed by students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, visit: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sdc/
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