Yes, please no blurred images or star navigation. We wouldn't want to go off path and do a "litho"-braking on Pluto, making it a Kuipler-belt version of Deep Impact

An updated NH mission background and current status presentation, replete with
some nice eye candy, can be found as the topmost link at www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb

Lovely pic of the near-complete spacecraft on slide 3, and great shot of the spin test on 41. Sound like everything is on schedule, much better and you'd be shooing MRO out the way to make room at the Atlas LC

You look at the cutaway drawing of the launch vehcile and I honestly cant remember the payload being a smaller percentage of the LV - it really highlights just how much energy is required.

Doug

Doug,

As small as spacecraft as you can get away with and as large a launcher as
an Atlas V plus the STAR-48, and the combination is SPEED! We cross the orbit
of the Moon in 9 hours-- about 10x faster than Apollo trips (3 days). We're
at Jupiter in 13 months-- the previous record is 17 months.

Of course, we still have a great deal to do before we can fly...

-Alan

I THINK the Pioneer Jupiter missions crossed the Moon's orbit in 10 or 11 hours. Light spacecraft, on an Atlas Centaur with a solid fuel kick stage. "Bat out of Hell" trajectory.

When will New Horizons exceed Voyager 1's distance from the Sun?

They did indeed -- 10 hours in the case of Pioneer 10, I distinctly remember -- and so did the Voyagers and Ulysses. New Horizons, however, will be moving out faster than any of them. (Ulysses currently holds the record for short travel time to Jupiter -- 16 months, not 17 as Alan Stern said -- and Voyager 1 is second at 18 months.)

Alan: Do you and the science team plan to (or have you not thought about it yet) share the raw NH images with the public as soon as they're downlinked, as the Cassini and MER teams do?

And if you do - could you consult people here w.r.t. whatever the 'stretching' algorythm might be for them

As we so often find with MER / Cassini imagery - a badly stretched image is not worth much more than no image at all

doug

Yes, that is the plan. But as to how we will mechanize it, ask in 2012 or so. It's a wee
bit early to be worrying that detail.

-Alan

But the Jupiter fly-by will be much earlier than that. Feb 2007 is close enough for me to start worrying

Good slideshow -
I note that there's an image of the spacecraft being spun around in environmental testing. You wouldn't happen to have a video of that test by any chance?

I don't. Maybe I can turn one up when I get back from my Maine
vacation in 10 days.

Another great image is in the July 11 issue of Aviation Week on page 17. It points out Ralph and Alice. Although small, if you look closely and use the SwRI slideshow as a guide, you can see the other external instruments, SWAP and PEPSSI, on the far side. (The LORRI door is closed.) Such a handsome craft.

After talking about the great progress being made, the short article also discusses the power situation, saying that the electrical power available at encounter will be 120W, vs an original plan of 190W. Is this an accurate current projection?

The numbers in the AvWeek article are not correct.

Our original expectation was 225 W at 2015.5 (the best case Pluto encounter date).
The problems at LANL prevented this from obtaining.

At one point it looked as bad as 150 W at 2015.5. The spacecraft requires about
165 W to run the encounter, counting an allocation for the payload. As a result
of some very good work at DOE, we now have an expectation of 192+/-2W at
2015.5, which is perfectly adequate.