New Horizons: Pre-launch, launch and main cruise, Pluto and the Kuiper belt Options

[cIclops]

Yes it's happening after all these years, the mission to the last planet!

And maybe to celebrate the confirmation of budget, NASA approval preparations and the fueling of the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator), there is an updated web site at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Launch will be January 2006 with arrival at the Pluto Charon system July 2015 (mark your calender!) and then on through the Kuiper belt during 2016-2020 and beyond.

20.8-centimeter telescope for 100m resolution at closest approach
IR/UV spectrometers
2 x 8GB data recorders
data rate: 768 bps (sic) to 70m DSN
465kg including fuel
$650m

336 days to launch

[DEChengst]

Maybe I should assign someone to do Q&A with this site. The questions are good ones.

I think it's great to have you onboard Alan. It's so cool to be able to ask questions to the people actually working on the mission and get a response within a day. Compared to these days, Voyager happened in the dark ages. You had to wait a month for a magazine to see the first results, and ofcourse that wouldn't anwser all the question you had. Internet is a great tool to make people enthousiastic about a mission and give them something back for the tax money they pay to fund the missions. I really like the MER and Cassini rawimages website as you can use them to create your own mosaics. I hope New Horizons will do the same. If you do so I think it would be great to include some target pointing and distance information in the filename as this would really help us amateurs to find matching images to create mosaics from. MER includes a lot of info in the filename which is great, Cassini does not which makes them harder to use.

A lot of visitors on this forum also hang out on IRC in #space at irc.freenode.net. Perhaps you would like to join some time for an interactive question and anwser session ?