* Astronomy

Things are going well out in the cold space between Saturn and Uranus where New Horizons is now. Were deep in planning for our spacecrafts annual checkout this summer, which begins on July 7.

Despite still being more than six years and just over 18 astronomical units from the Pluto system, the New Horizons project team is conducting the second and final portion of our Pluto Encounter Preliminary Design Review (EPDR) today and tomorrow (May 20-21) at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.
We conducted the first portion of the EPDR on January 7-8. EPDR part two is another two-day confab, in which the New Horizons technical and management teams will present the detailed, minute-by-minute timeline of our planned 2015 Pluto encounter to a review team of expert planetary planners from across the nation. EPDR represents the culmination of almost two years of intense encounter planning involving the entire New Horizons science and mission team, and the stakes are high - this is the main technical review of what will take place when we conduct the first exploration of Pluto and its satellites.

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New Horizons Detects Neptune's Moon Triton
Add another moon to the New Horizons photo gallery: the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager detected Triton, the largest of Neptune's 13 known moons, during the annual spacecraft checkout last fall.
New Horizons was 3.75 billion kilometres from Neptune on Oct. 16, when LORRI, following a programmed sequence of commands, locked onto the planet and snapped away.

"We wanted to test LORRI's ability to measure a faint object near a much brighter one using a special tracking mode, and the Neptune-Triton pair perfectly fit the bill" - New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

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The first major order of business in New Horizons second annual checkout was accomplished as planned, as operators uploaded an upgraded version of the software that runs the spacecrafts Command and Data Handling system.

Our brain transplant was a success. The new software which guides how New Horizons carries out commands and collects and stores data is now on the spacecrafts main computer and operating, over a billion miles from home! - Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator.

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As you read these words, the New Horizons spacecraft remains in a long period of almost continuous hibernation, which began on Feb. 21 and stretches until Sept. 2. During this time the spacecraft will fly from nine to almost 11 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is, covering more than 300 million more kilometres! Except for two weeks of high activity that begins May 20, the spacecraft is running on its own, and doing little besides reporting its status each Monday and delivering a brief telemetry report most Thursdays. These contacts have shown that things are going well: all of the weekly status reports (technically called "beacon tones") have been green, and all of the telemetry passes have indicated that the spacecraft is performing well.

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