The spacecraft flew by the solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter, for a gravity assist maneuver on Feb. A month later, on April 7, 2006, New Horizons passed the orbit of Mars.Ī fortuitous chance to test some of the spacecraft’s instruments – especially Ralph (the visible and infrared imager and spectrometer) – occurred June 13, 2006, when New Horizons passed by a tiny asteroid named 132524 APL at a range of about 63,300 miles (101,867 kilometers). The spacecraft was now set on a trajectory to the outer reaches of the solar system.Ĭontrollers implemented course corrections on Jan. The design of the spacecraft was based on a lineage traced back to the CONTOUR and TIMED spacecraft, both also built by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.īesides its suite of scientific instruments, New Horizons carries a cylindrical radioisotope thermoelectric generator (a spare from the Cassini mission) that provided about 250 watts of power at launch (decaying to 200 watts by the time of the Pluto encounter).Īfter reaching initial Earth orbit at about 105 × 130 miles (167 × 213 kilometers), the Centaur upper stage fired (for a second time) for nine minutes to boost the payload to an elliptical orbit that stretched to the asteroid belt.Ī second firing of the Star 48B solid rocket accelerated the spacecraft to a velocity of about 36,400 miles per hour (58,536 kilometers per hour), the highest launch velocity attained by a human-made object relative to Earth. By the time it reached the Pluto system, the spacecraft had traveled farther away and for a longer time period (more than nine years) than any previous deep space spacecraft ever launched. New Horizons was the first spacecraft to encounter Pluto, a relic from the formation of the solar system. (The program also includes Juno and OSIRIS-REx.) It was the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program, a medium-class, competitively selected, and principal investigator-led series of missions. New Horizons is a NASA mission to study the dwarf planet Pluto, its moons, and other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system that extends from about 30 AU, near the orbit of Neptune, to about 50 AU from the Sun. Credit: NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD) ![]() First spacecraft to explore a second Kuiper Belt Object up close – Arrokoth (2014 MU69)Ī 3D model of NASA's New Horizons, a mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.First spacecraft to explore Pluto and its Moons up close.Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI).Solar Wind and Plasma Spectrometer (SWAP). ![]()
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