. 24/7 Space News .
Happy Second Birthday New Horizons

This montage of giant Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, replete with the spectacular Tvashtar polar plume, was assembled from New Horizons imagery.
by Alan Stern
Washington DC (SPX) Jan 18, 2008
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 a great 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 seven years hence. (Interestingly, this month also commemorates the seventh anniversary of the first New Horizons team meetings to write our proposal to NASA, so we are now at the halfway point from project inception to encounter!)

As you can see by visiting our Where Is New Horizons, we are now nearing a distance of 9 Astronomical Units from the Sun and speeding onward. This time next year, we'll already be almost halfway between 12 and 13 AU!

Our spacecraft will be in quiet cruise or hibernation for most of 2008. Short wakeups 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 (nor will such be very likely in 2009, either).

The major work of New Horizons in 2008 will be on the ground. One activity will be the creation, testing and uploading of new spacecraft software 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.

In addition to these two activities and routine flight operations in cruise and annual checkout, we also expect to commission NHOPS-2, our newly minted backup spacecraft simulator.

In the meantime, though, we've savoring the successful second year of flight the project has had. And the homemade cake to the right (made by APL's Simmie Berman) 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!

Community
Email This Article
Comment On This Article

Related Links
The million outer planets of a star called Sol



Memory Foam Mattress Review
Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily
XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News


The PI's Perspective: Autumn 2007: Onward to the Kuiper Belt
Laurel MD (SPX) Nov 26, 2007
New Horizons has now covered 85% of the distance from the Sun to Saturn's orbit, which it will pass in mid-2008. Of course, Saturn will be nowhere near New Horizons when we pass that milestone, as it is by chance located far around the Sun from the path New Horizons is following to Pluto. But as you can tell, we are really getting to be well into the outer solar system now.







  • Environmental Tectonics NASTAR Center Announces Launch Of New Air And Space Adventure Programs
  • ATK To Design And Build Solar Arrays For NASA's Orion CEV
  • NASA inspector general comes under fire
  • SpaceDev Completes Completes Flight Test Plan For Dream Chaser

  • Scientists examine effects of wind on Mars
  • Ice Clouds Put Mars In The Shade
  • 2007 WD5 Mars Collision Effectively Ruled Out As Impact Odds Widen To 1 In 10000
  • Russia claims to be ahead in race to put man on Mars

  • Russia To Launch Two Telecom Satellites On Jan 28 And Feb 10
  • Thuraya-3 Satellite Successfully Launched To Orbit
  • Boosting Capability: Santa Maria Station To Join ESTRACK
  • Sea Launch Begins Countdown For Thuraya-3 Launch

  • Radical New Lab Fights Disease Using Satellites
  • SPACEHAB Subsidiary Wins NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory Contract
  • SKorea decides to terminate satellite: space agency
  • Japanese satellite flops at map-making: official

  • Happy Second Birthday New Horizons
  • The PI's Perspective: Autumn 2007: Onward to the Kuiper Belt
  • Data For The Next Generations
  • Goddard Instrument Makes Cover Of Science

  • Rutgers And Penn State Astronomy Teams Discover Ancestors Of Milky Way-Type Galaxies
  • The Violent Lives Of Galaxies: Caught In The Cosmic Dark Matter Web
  • Circumstellar Dust Takes Flight In The Moth
  • Mystery gamma-ray source pinned to vampire stars

  • Amateur Radio Operators Asked To Tune Into Lunar Radar Bounce
  • With Moon Dirt In Demand, Geoscientist's Business Is Booming
  • NASA Announces Study Human Lunar Lander Design As Students Line Up For Moonbuggy Races
  • Europe's Next Ride To The Moon: Chandrayaan-1

  • USAF And LockMart Team Completes On-Orbit Deployment Of Modernized GPS Satellite In Record Time
  • Behind the scenes, tech firms mapping the world
  • NOAA To Ensure Global Navigation Satellite System Accuracy
  • New Glonass Satellites Due To Operate For Seven Years

  • The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2007 - SpaceDaily.AFP and UPI Wire Stories are copyright Agence France-Presse and United Press International. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by SpaceDaily on any Web page published or hosted by SpaceDaily. Privacy Statement