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TOPIC: New Horizons mission
Blobrana


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RE: New Horizons mission
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Just a year after it was dispatched on the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is on the doorstep of the solar system's largest planet — about to swing past Jupiter and pick up even more speed on its voyage toward the unexplored regions of the planetary frontier.

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Credit NASA

This image was taken on Jan. 8, 2007, with the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), while the spacecraft was about 81 million kilometres from Jupiter. Jupiter's volcanic moon Io is to the right; the planet's Great Red Spot is also visible. The image was one of 11 taken during the Jan. 8 approach sequence, which signalled the opening of the New Horizons Jupiter encounter.

The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons will make its closest pass to Jupiter on Feb. 28, threading its path through an "aim point" 2.3 million kilometres from the centre of Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity will accelerate New Horizons away from the Sun by an additional 14,500 kilometres per hour — half the speed of a space shuttle in orbit — pushing it past 83,700 kmph and hurling it toward a pass through the Pluto system in July 2015.


Missed the Jupiter flyby press conference on Jan. 18? Catch the replay this weekend on NASA TV.
The event is scheduled to run on the NASA Media and Public channels at 8 a.m., 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. (Eastern Time) on both Saturday and Sunday (Jan. 20-21).

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Blobrana


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NASA will host a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Thursday, Jan. 18, to preview the flight of the Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft through the Jupiter system. The briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium, 300 E St., S.W., Washington. The briefing will air live on NASA Television and streamed at www.nasa.gov.
New Horizons will use Jupiter's gravity to boost its speed toward the outer solar system, while training its cameras and sensors on the giant planet and its moons during a six-month encounter.

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Blobrana


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The Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft has begun snapping images and making scientific measurements of Jupiter, as it nears its closest approach to the planet on 28 February.
The measurements will act as a 'dress rehearsal' for the spacecraft's true target – a flyby study of Pluto and its three moons in 2015.

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Blobrana


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What a memorable year for New Horizons! After the final few ground preparations and flight approvals, we launched at 1900 GMT (2 p.m. EST) on January 19. I will never forget the sight of the giant, 210-foot-tall "A Train" leaving Florida for the Kuiper Belt, and how filled with pride I was for everyone who worked to see this milestone come to pass.

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Blobrana


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Instruments on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

Antenna: Maintains links with Nasa scientists
Pepssi: Measures particles escaping from Pluto's atmosphere
Swap: Measures interaction of Pluto with solar wind
Lorri: Powerful telescope and digital camera fortified against cold
SDC: Detects dust grains from collisions in Kuiper Belt
Ralph: Makes maps of Pluto, moons and Kuiper Belt Objects
Alice: Probes composition and structure of Pluto's atmosphere
Rex: Measures atmospheric pressure and temperature



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Blobrana


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The New Horizons team got a faint glimpse of the mission's distant, main planetary target when one of the spacecraft's telescopic cameras spotted Pluto for the first time.
The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took the pictures during an optical navigation test on Sept. 21-24, and stored them on the spacecraft's data recorder until their recent transmission back to Earth. Seen at a distance of about 4.2 billion kilometres from the spacecraft, Pluto is little more than a faint point of light among a dense field of stars. But the images prove that the spacecraft can find and track long-range targets, a critical capability the team will use to navigate New Horizons toward 2,500-kilometer wide Pluto and, later, one or more 50-kilometer sized Kuiper Belt objects.

newhorizonPluto1
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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

Mission scientists knew they had Pluto in their sights when LORRI detected an unresolved "point" in Pluto's predicted position, moving at the planet's expected motion across the constellation of Sagittarius near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. Pluto appears in all three images of that region of space LORRI photographed on Sept. 21 and Sept. 24, confirming that it was "real" and not a cosmic ray or other object. For further confirmation, the object moving along Pluto's predicted path in the sky has a visual magnitude (brightness) a little brighter than 14, just what could be expected from Pluto at that time and that distance from New Horizons.

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 17:18, 2006-11-28

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Blobrana


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NASA's New Horizons probe, bound for Pluto, snapped an image of Jupiter that astronomers said serves as a promise of what's to come early next year when the craft nears the gas giant planet.

060926jupiterHORIZON
Credit NASA

New Horizons won't reach Pluto until 2015. Meantime, it is testing out its equipment on a much larger target.
The craft was about 291 million kilometres away from Jupiter when the image was snapped with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI.

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Blobrana


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LORRI First Light
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The highest-resolution camera on NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft is seeing stars, and mission scientists and engineers couldn't be more excited.

This week the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) opened its protective cover and took its first image in space, of Messier 7, a star cluster in our Milky Way galaxy. The electronic snapshot also meant that all seven New Horizons science instruments have now operated in space and returned good data since the spacecraft launched in January 2006.
Developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which also built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, LORRI is the long focal length, reflecting telescope on New Horizons, designed to acquire the highest-resolution images of Pluto and its moons during a flyby in summer 2015.


On Aug. 29, 2006, the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) opened its launch cover door and took its first image in space, of Messier 7, a star cluster in our Milky Way galaxy. This "negative" image shows the center of Messier 7, which was catalogued by Charles Messier in 1764, and described by Ptolemy around 130 A.D. Stars to at least 12th magnitude are clearly visible, meaning LORRI's sensitivity and noise levels in space are consistent with its pre-launch calibrations on the ground. Directionally, north is at the top of the images, east is to the left.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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Blobrana


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2002JF56
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On June 11 and 13, observations of 2002 JF56 were made with the Ralph MVIC colour camera, MVIC's panchromatic cameras, and Ralph's LEISA infrared imaging spectrometer.



The space probe flew just over 102,000 kilometres from the asteroid.

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Blobrana


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New Horizons Digital Time Capsule
Entry Deadline Extended to November 1, 2006
One Grand Prize Winner will win a trip to the Applied Physics Laboratory to witness New Horizons' encounter with Jupiter on February 27-28, 2007! Read the contest rules for details.

The Planetary Society, in conjunction with the New Horizons mission, invites children and adults around the world to send a message to future Earth -- a New Horizons Digital Time Capsule from those who launched the mission to the inhabitants of Earth who receive its results nearly a decade later.

The New Horizons Digital Time Capsule will consist of photographs of things in 2006 that people expect will be transformed by 2015. How will life on our planet have changed in those intervening years? More than a billion people will be born, and a billion die; new technologies could revolutionize daily life; the rapid pace of change will have transformed not only our own lives but also cities and entire countries. Earth will have discovered other new horizons while the New Horizons mission cruised through interplanetary space.
The New Horizons Digital Time Capsule will be placed on a DVD and kept securely at Planetary Society Headquarters in Pasadena, California with a backup copy stored with the New Horizons project. As New Horizons approaches its rendezvous with Pluto, it will send back a "family portrait" of the Pluto system. The return of this image from the spacecraft will be used as the signal for the time capsule to be opened and shown to Earth 2015. As we see a close up family portrait of Pluto and its moons, we will also look back on the images of Earth as it was when the spacecraft started its journey.

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