New Horizons Status Report: September 20, 2002
New Horizons Team Tuning its Instruments
The New Horizons instrument payload is years away from peering into
the atmosphere of Pluto or snapping detailed pictures of the distant
world, its moon, Charon, or the Kuiper Belt objects beyond. But the
work to develop this deep-space scientific toolbox and prepare
it for the long journey to edge of our planetary system is well
underway.
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 ú pulled from NASA centers, universities
and private firms ú 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:
Pluto Exploration Remote Sensing Investigation (PERSI), a suite of
three optical sensors for making visible, infrared and ultraviolet
observations, to be built by the Southwest Research Institute, Ball
Aerospace and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), built by the Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), will provide
long-range and high-resolution visible mapping.
Two charged-particle detectors — the Solar Wind Analyzer for
Pluto (SWAP) by SwRI and the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer
Science Investigation (PEPSSI) from APL — will analyze the
materials escaping from Pluto’s atmosphere.
REX, the radio science experiment APL is designing with Stanford
University, will probe Pluto’s atmospheric structure and gauge the
average surface temperatures of Pluto and Charon by measuring the
intensity of radio signals that reach the spacecraft’s 7-foot (2.1
meter) dish antenna.
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.
