NASA’s New Horizons is more than half-way to an encounter with distant Pluto.
Launched in January 2006, the spacecraft today enters its next wakeup period from hibernation.
According to New Horizon’s principal investigator, Alan Stern, the main purpose of the 10-day November wakeup will be to re-point the probe’s communication antenna to account for the motion of the Earth around the Sun, and to gather tracking data for the craft’s navigation team.
In addition, ground operators will also uplink the command load (i.e., the set of detailed computerized instructions) that will direct spacecraft activities through Jan. 2, 2011 when they’ll do another 10-day hibernation wakeup with similar goals.
New Horizons is traveling at an impressive speed, but the journey to Pluto still takes almost a decade – so the halfway milestone celebrated last month was “a real morale builder” for the project’s mission team, Stern added.
The probe’s Pluto-Charon Encounter is set for July 2015.
New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt of rocky, icy objects beyond.
Principal Investigator Stern leads a mission team that includes the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, Ball Aerospace Corporation, the Boeing Company, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford University, KinetX, Inc., Lockheed Martin Corporation, University of Colorado, the U.S. Department of Energy, and a number of other firms, NASA centers and university partners.
By LD/CSE