New Horizons NASA's Mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt
Status Report: September 25, 2002
Last month the New Horizons team completed preliminary design reviews for each instrument. Panels of experts in electronics, optics, device chemistry, charged particle detection, thermal protection, spacecraft structure and other areas pulled from NASA centers, universities and private firms pored over the plans for each instrument and grilled the instrument teams on various aspects of their designs.
"The reviews were very helpful," says William Gibson, New Horizons payload manager, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio. "Each instrument team benefited. There were no fundamental problems with any instrument. Most of the discussions dealt with designing hardware and software for a mission as long as New Horizons. It's one thing to design for something that will orbit Earth for two years, but quite another for a deep space probe on 10- to 15-year mission."
The NASA mission is in initial development. If funded for construction later this year, New Horizons would launch in January 2006, swing around Jupiter for scientific studies and a gravity boost in 2007, reach Pluto as early as 2015, and then visit up to three Kuiper Belt Objects. Its instruments include:
The instruments are scheduled for completion by summer 2004, after which they'll be integrated with the spacecraft being designed and built at APL. "We are very pleased with the progress," Gibson says. "The teams are working hard, the instrument performance numbers look very promising, and we are on schedule."
New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto, its moon, Charon, and the Kuiper Belt of rocky, icy objects beyond. Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, director of the Southwest Research Institute's Space Studies Department, Boulder, Colo., leads a mission team that includes major partners at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.; Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; Ball Aerospace Corp., Boulder; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. APL manages the mission for NASA and will design, build and operate the New Horizons spacecraft.