Star 48b Third-stage Motor, Leaving the solar system Options

[Guido]

I suppose the STAR 48B third-stage, which put New Horizons on its trajectory towards Jupiter, follows about the same flight-path as the New Horizons spacecraft itself. If this is the case, will it too in the end leave our solar system?
Or has it been deflected after seperation from the spacecraft?

[tasp]

Both Voyagers had Centaur stages that left earth at interesting velocities in interesting directions, too. And the Voyager final solid stages would have had trajectories even closer to the the Voyagers.

Wonder what happened to them?

[Alan Stern]

All.

Things are going well here at the APL MOC. New Horizons is operating
virtually flawlessly. TCM 1a and 1b are planned for 28 Jan and 30 Jan,
respectively, with a total delta-V of 18 m/s-- which is far smaller than
the 92 m/s budgeted for pre-flight. Good news!

Today we are planning to complete the spacecraft's planned spin down to 5
RPM (was 68 RPM for the STAR-48 firing, is now 19.2 RPM after an open-loop
burn on launch day). Once we slow it down this afternoon, we'll do the
initial star tracker turn ons. Until then, we're still relying on the sun
sensors and IMUs-- both of which are performing very well. The s/c temps
are running a little hot, but that's just due to our attitude combined
with our <1 AU helio distance (we're inside 1 AU because we launched near
Earth's perihelion).

About the heliocentric distance, we will be inside 1 AU until late on 29
Jan UT. That makes us officially an inner planet mission for the first 10
days, I guess.

We will pass the orbit of Mars on 8 April, just a little after MRO
gets there, and it had a 5.5 month head start.

FYI-- The C/A to Jupiter is going to be at approx 6 hrs UTC on 28 Feb
2007. A better number will be forthcoming, but that is good to an accuracy
of better than an hour already. C/A is to be at 32 RJ.

Because we have to slow down in TCM-1a and TCM-1B by those 18 m/s,
our intrepid Boeing STAR-48 third stage will beat New Horizons to
Jupiter by 6 hrs. However, because it will not hit the Pluto aim point, it will not
beat us to Pluto (a relief-- can you imagine us having to be the second to
Pluto after all this, having been beat by a derelict Boeing upper stage?).
In fact, the projected C/A distance of the third stage to Pluto will be
213 million km (well over 1 AU), occurring on 15 Oct 2015.

-Alan