New Horizons, Pluto and the Kuiper belt Options

[Alan Stern]

I wouldn't read too much into a single adjective, here. NH's Jupiter system imagery was undeniably stunning, though...

Take it from me, I am certain "stunned" was not meant to telegraph a message we'd found ET or something equivalent. Hopefully, you can sleep now rather than lying awake in rapt anticipation.

-Alan

[centsworth_II]

Stunned?!

This probably does not refer to any new revelations, but simply is an accurate report of the reaction at the time. For example,
we all WERE stunned (scientists included) by the images of Io's plumes -- and the movie!

[Greg Hullender]

I guess "delighted" just didn't sound serious enough . . .

The other possibility was that they'd already gone into hibernation, waiting for NH to reach Pluto, and were stunned to learn that someone expected them to publish Jupiter results first. :-)

--Greg

[ustrax]

I guess "delighted" just didn't sound serious enough . . .

I guess "delightning" is the word...

[Alan Stern]

The PI’s Perspective
17 January 2008

Happy Birthday New Horizons!
Two Years on the Road to the Ninth Planet



New Horizons will celebrate the completion of its second year in flight this Saturday, January 19th.

Just like the parent of a kid growing up from an infant to a toddler, my experience with New Horizons in flight since our launch two years ago this week, is that the first two years have passed amazingly quickly and yet amazingly slowly, all at the same time. I guess that given some of the spacecraft hiccups of the past several months, one could also analogize that New Horizons has reached the Terrible Two stage and is into saying “no” a little more these days than in its first year.

Honestly, though, it’s been an amazing second year that included a phenomenally successful Jupiter encounter, a course correction, our first annual checkout, and science team work to begin in earnest the planning for THE encounter at Pluto, still 7 years hence. (Interestingly, this month also commemorates the 7th anniversary of the first New Horizons team meetings to write our proposal to NASA, so we are now at the half way point from project inception to encounter!).

This montage of giant Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, replete with the spectacular Tvashtar polar plume, was assembled from New Horizons imagery.

As you can see by visiting http://www.pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php, we are now nearing a distance of 9 AU from the Sun and speeding onward. This time next year, we’ll already be almost half way between 12 and 13 AU!

As you know, our spacecraft will be in quiet cruise or hibernation most of the time in 2008. Short wake-ups will occur in May and December to re-point our high gain antenna toward Earth and conduct other maintenance activities. Also on our flight plan is our second active checkout which will fill the period from September through early November with many kinds of spacecraft and instrument activities. But otherwise we plan for things to be very quiet on orbit this year. And we have already determined from tracking data that our trajectory correction maneuver in late September was so accurate that no clean up burn will be required in 2008 (and indeed, nor will such be very likely in 2009 either).

The major work of New Horizons in 2008 will be on the ground. One major activity will be the creation, testing, and uploading of new spacecraft software loads with various bug fixes and performance improvements that derived from our Jupiter encounter and second year flight experiences. Another large activity will be designing and building the entire Pluto near encounter sequence, which we will also prepare for test on our spacecraft simulator, “NHOPS,” next year. And in addition to these two major activities and routine flight operations in cruise and annual checkout, we also expect to commission NHOPS-2, our newly-minted backup spacecraft simulator in 2008.

In the meantime, though, we’ve savoring the successful second year of flight the project has had. And the home-made cake below is evidence of that!

Well, that catches you up with where New Horizons is and what the spacecraft and project team have been doing. I’ll be back with more news in March. In the meantime, keep on exploring, just like we do!

[nprev]

Thanks for the update, Alan, and congratulations to you and the NH team for reaching the "true" halfway point to Pluto! Sounds like a reasonably busy year ahead for you all.

[ugordan]

Has it been two years already?

Onward!

[tasp]

Pretty encouraging news about the trajectory accuracy.

{eagerly thinking fuel saved now buys more/bigger KBO targets later!}

[rschare]

When do they start looking for new KBO's years closer? Do they need to decide where to go before or after Pluto encounter for any course changes?

[ugordan]

The Pluto aimpoint is fixed. The spacecraft doesn't use Pluto's gravity to set course for another KBO, that would constrain the approach trajectories severely and the planet's gravity is insufficient anyway. All retargeting will be done by propulsive maneuvers after the Pluto flyby.

[centsworth_II]

The Pluto aimpoint is fixed.

So I'm assuming that there is already a fixed, narrow cone of space that
can be intensely studied for objects that can be observed by NH after the
Pluto encounter? I hope we get updates on how the search is going,
negative as well as positive results, (has it started in earnest yet?).

[SpaceListener]

The spacecraft doesn't use Pluto's gravity to set course for another KBO, that would constrain the approach trajectories severely and the planet's gravity is insufficient anyway.

It depends upon to what target.

Anyway, this would be of some help to get an even closer to a desired target along with employing own propulsion.

After adjusting the trayectory of New Horizon spacecraft to be closer to Pluto, it might deviate its trayectory in somewhat?

However, this case must be evaluated since changing the trayectory will implicate many plan changes such as the calibration of scientific instrument for collecting data from Pluto during its close journery. Let us see it in future whenever if there is a new interesting target.

[MahFL]

They have about 9 years to look for a KBO target.

[Alan Stern]

They have about 9 years to look for a KBO target.

We did a pilot search in 005-2006 to prove the technique but Pluto is against the center of the Milky Way in Sagittarius This makes useful searches too time consuming-- the starfields are too dense! So we have always planned to begin in 2011 when Pluto moves out of the worst of it.

-Alan

[nprev]

Alan, is there any chance that one or more of those test search images might be released to the public? I'm just really curious to see what they look like...dense starfields at high resolution are interesting in themselves.

Slightly OT, here, but finally went over to the NH site and wow that cake looks good! Might have to take a trip to a bakery...