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

[djellison]

Wow - that was a 'shot' I was wondering about before it went out to the pad - something we've never seen before - for some reason the KSC website is down for me at the moment - but once it's back up I'll have a good look!

Doug

[Airbag]

Something I've wondered about before...what are all those round objects on the inside of the payload fairing that look like lights? Presumably some kind of vibration or sound dampening system, but why that shape?

Airbag

[BPCooper]

Something I've wondered about before...what are all those round objects on the inside of the payload fairing that look like lights?  Presumably some kind of vibration or sound dampening system, but why that shape?

Airbag

Yes, sound dampening fittings.

[john_s]

Yup - best analogy I could come up with when I was talking about this to someone a few weeks ago...

NH is packing iso 6400 film - and it's not going to perform too well outside, on a bright summer sunny day

Doug

We've recently figured out that we can probably image the daysides of the Galilean satellites (and Jupiter too, when it's far enough away that it doesn't fill the frame) with LORRI without saturation: see this post on the Jupiter encounter thread. Not a done deal, but we're optimistic. MVIC color images will still be saturated, though, so we won't get beautiful full-disk color images of Jupiter like Cassini's.


John.

[Alan Stern]

Advance copy for the NH PI's Perspective to appear early in the coming week:

Last week, details of discoveries and early interpretation of Pluto’s two small moons, formally called S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2 were published in a pair of papers (Weaver et al. 2006 and Stern et al. 2006) in the scientific journal, Nature. Nature is very much the Rolling Stone of the scientific community, and the discovery and interpretation of ‘P1’ and ‘P2’ won the cover of Nature. This is probably as close as the nine of us will ever get to making the cover of the Rolling Stone. Although this was my tenth scientific publication in Nature, it was a real rush of accomplishment that vindicated long years of searching the Pluto system for companions to Pluto and Charon.

In our two back-to-back papers, we described the orbits and sizes of our two newly-discovered moons, discussed the unique architecture of the Pluto satellite system, predicted that similarly complex satellite systems will be found routinely in the Kuiper Belt, predicted that P1 and P2 probably generate ephemeral rings around Pluto, and argued that P1 and P2’s orbits argue strongly that they were born in the cataclysmic collision of a large KBO onto Pluto that created Charon, billions of years ago. In fact, we believe that the presence of P1 and P2 in the orbital plane of Charon is very much the discovery that checkmates the 20 year old hypothesis that Charon was born as a result of a giant impact onto Pluto.

On the same day, February 23rd, that Nature published our papers and an accompanying “News and Views” piece by New Horizons co-investigator Rick Binzel, the nine of us on the discovery team also published a scientific bulletin called an IAU Circular. This brief communication, ed by Max Mutchler and Andrew Steffl, revealed the results of brand-new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of P1 and P2, made just days before on 15 February. The new HST images confirm the discovery (see above for an image from this run on HST); the new imagery also shows that our published orbital predictions, made in the fall. were almost bang on. We expect to get one more HST observation on March 2nd, from which we hope to further refine the orbits of P1 and p2 and to also obtain the first high quality color measurements of P1 and P2.

You may have also heard that we’re working on official names for P1 and P2. We hope to submit those to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for formal approval this spring. In the meantime, we’re referring to the pair as “Boulder” and “Baltimore,” in honor of the home towns of 8 of the 9 people on the discovery team (and, we note, the respective locations where HST’s instruments were built and where HST’s scientific institute is located). S/2005 P1, which is the larger moon is the one we call “Baltimore”; S/2005 P2, being smaller, is the one we call “Boulder.”

And what about New Horizons? Well, it’s halfway to the orbit of Mars now, and the flight mission is continuing smoothly. Last week, we conducted the “Launch Plus 35 Day” review of the engineering and operational aspects of the mission. In this formal, day long review, the engineering leads and the ops team presented the status and lessons learned from the first five weeks of flight to a review team consisting of experienced spacecraft engineers and project managers.

Also last week, we conducted the first testing of instruments in our scientific payload. In total, three instruments were tested last week: ALICE, PEPSSI, and LORRI. (And there is no truth, dear reader, to the rumor that we chose these three to begin with because they spell, A-P-L.)

Although “first light” for each of these three instruments is still in the future the early tests we preformed last week proved that all three instruments survived launch and have good power and command interfaces to
the spacecraft. Additionally, each instrument put their microprocessors through various paces, and ALICE
unlatched and successfully tested her front door by opening it to space. All of this testing went well and we’re very happy with the engineering data returned to Earth by all three of these instruments.

This week, SWAP and SDC will get turned on and tested similarly to the work done last week with ALICE, PEPSSI, and LORRI. In fact, SDC will even begin collecting data. And so will PEPSSI. Starting in March, we plan to use SDC, PEPSSI, and SWAP a great deal during the flight to Pluto in order to trace out conditions in the interplanetary environment across the space of 5 billion plus kilometers from here to the Kuiper Belt.

In March, we will continue instrument commissioning with increasingly complex testing of our optical and plasma instruments. Additionally, both copies of our radio science instrument, REX, will receive their initial check outs in mid-April.

Also in March, we’ll be undertaking four very important activities with the New Horizons spacecraft itself.
One I’ve discussed before is a course correction called TCM-3. This roughly 1.2 meter/second trajectory correction maneuver will trim up our course to the Pluto keyhole at Jupiter even more precisely than TCM-1A and 1B did. TCM-3 is planned for Thursday, March 9th. The other major activities for March are an upload of a few bug post-launch fixes to our Command and Data Handling (C&DH) software, the checkout of our High Gain Antenna, (HGA) and the installation of something called CLTSN.

CLTSN stands for Command Loss Timer Safety Net. It’s a new feature of the spacecraft’s autonomous fault detection and protection system designed to act as a backup (“last ditch”) recovery of the mission if the spacecraft determines it has failed to hear from the ground controllers for too long a time (about 135 days). If this unlikely happenstance ever occurs, autonomy’s CLTSN switches the entire spacecraft avionics chain to the backup side, turns the spacecraft back to a good communications attitude with the HGA disk pointed toward Earth, sets the downlink beacon to “Red 6” and fires up the receivers to await new instructions from Earth.

CLTSN, which we colloquially call the “catcher’s mitt,” is a new layer of autonomous spacecraft recovery smarts designed to give take over if the normal autonomous fault detection and recovery procedures have failed to recover the mission. This is something I insisted on seeing added to the mission before I signed off on launch. I hope we never have to use CLTSN, because it’ll mean we’re down to our last play in our the playbook. But I do think it’s an important new capability. After all, without CLTSN, we wouldn’t have a last ditch recovery to take over if some “unknown, unknown” prevented the normal recovery processes from working as we expect them to.

Well, you can see the next few weeks are going to be busy for New Horizons. Pluto, Charon, Boulder, and Baltimore lie ahead.

Until next time.

-Alan

[RNeuhaus]

Thank you for keeping us very well informed about the NH's progress.

Rodolfo

[punkboi]

Thanks for the update, Alan. Can't wait to read what the official names of P1 and P2 are gonna be.

*coughProserpine&Liberacough*

[Bob Shaw]

Thanks for the update, Alan. Can't wait to read what the official names of P1 and P2 are gonna be.

*coughProserpine&Liberacough*

Liberace? Surely not - unless covered in glitter...

Bob Shaw

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned, but there's also a New Horizons-related article in the March 2006 issue of Discover Magazine.

[dvandorn]

Speaking of naming conventions for KBOs, we need to remember that there might be *thousands* of them out there.

There aren't thousands of names related to the Underworld out there. Heck, there aren't thousands of names of deities, period -- even if you add up all of the pantheons of all the religions from the dawn of civilization.

And most of the names of the deities from all of those pantheons have already been used to name at least one sky object.

I think it's possible we may be on the verge of seeing people being allowed to name objects they discover after whatever and whoever they want, as long as the names aren't obscene or offensive. So, how long will it be, I wonder, before we see bodies that are *really* named Xena and Gabrielle? Or Fred and Barney, for that matter...?

-the other Doug

[Stephen]

I think it's possible we may be on the verge of seeing people being allowed to name objects they discover after whatever and whoever they want, as long as the names aren't obscene or offensive. So, how long will it be, I wonder, before we see bodies that are *really* named Xena and Gabrielle? Or Fred and Barney, for that matter...?

Isn't that already the case with asteroids? KBOs are really just an icy version of asteroids.

(Mind you, since most asteroids do not get intelligible names, just a catalogue number, presumably that will be the fate of most KBOs too.)

======
Stephen

[edstrick]

You'll probably want to strangle me for this...

but there are thousands and tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of underworld names you could name KBO's after

*** CEMETARIES! ***

[climber]

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned, but there's also a New Horizons-related article in the March 2006 issue of Discover Magazine.

Also an interview of Alan Stern her : http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0602..._interview.html

[punkboi]

I think it's possible we may be on the verge of seeing people being allowed to name objects they discover after whatever and whoever they want, as long as the names aren't obscene or offensive. So, how long will it be, I wonder, before we see bodies that are *really* named Xena and Gabrielle? Or Fred and Barney, for that matter...?

-the other Doug

Don't forget Mulder and Scully, Beavis and Butthead, Starsky and Hutch, Sherlock and Dr. Watson, Tristan and Isolde (Good God), etc. etc...

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

That point has already been reached where asteroids are concerned -- for some years now there's been one officially named "Mr. Spock". I presume that much the same freedom will be allowed where KBOs are concerned -- especially since there are vastly more of them -- although I hope some kind of size limit is set, above which you can't give a KBO a really goofy name.