Designed and integrated at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland — with contributions from companies and institutions in the United States and abroad — the New Horizons spacecraft is a robust, lightweight observatory designed to withstand the long, difficult journey from the launch pad on Earth to the solar system's coldest, darkest frontiers.
The New Horizons science payload was developed under direction of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with instrument contributions from SwRI, APL, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Colorado, Stanford University and Ball Aerospace Corporation. Fully fueled, the agile, piano-sized probe weighed 478 kilograms (1,054 pounds) at launch. Designed to operate on a limited power source — a single radioisotope thermoelectric generator — New Horizons needs less power than a pair of 100-watt light bulbs to complete its mission at Pluto.
On average, each of the seven science instruments uses between 2 and 10 watts — about the power of a night light — when turned on. The instruments send data to one of two onboard solid-state memory banks, where data is recorded before later playback to Earth. During normal operations, the spacecraft communicates with Earth through its 2.1-meter (83-inch) wide high-gain antenna. Smaller antennas provide backup communications. And when the spacecraft was in hibernation through long stretches of its voyage, its computer was programmed to monitor its systems and report its status back to Earth with a specially coded, low-energy beacon signal.
New Horizons' "thermos bottle" design retains heat and keeps the spacecraft operating at room temperature without large heaters. Aside from protective covers on five instruments that were opened shortly after launch, and one small protective cover opened after the Jupiter encounter, New Horizons has no deployable mechanisms or scanning platforms. It does have backup devices for all major electronics, its star-tracking navigation cameras and data recorders.
New Horizons has operated mostly in a spin-stabilized mode while cruising between planets, and also in a three-axis “pointing” mode that allows for pointing or scanning instruments during calibrations and planetary encounters (like the Jupiter flyby and, of course, at Pluto). There are no reaction wheels on the spacecraft; small thrusters in the propulsion system handle pointing, spinning and course corrections. The spacecraft navigates using onboard gyros, star trackers and Sun sensors. The spacecraft's high-gain antenna dish is linked to advanced electronics and shaped to receive even the faintest radio signals from home — a necessity when the mission's main target is more than 3 billion miles from Earth and round-trip transmission time is nine hours.+
New Horizons' primary structure includes an aluminum central cylinder that supports the spacecraft body panels, supports the interface between the spacecraft and its radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) power source, and houses the propellant tank. It also served as the payload adapter fitting that connected the spacecraft to the launch vehicle.
Keeping mass down, the panels surrounding the central cylinder feature an aluminum honeycomb core with ultra-thin aluminum face sheets (about as thick as two pieces of paper). To keep it perfectly balanced for spinning operations, the spacecraft was weighed and then balanced with additional weights just before mounting on the launch vehicle.
Not all balance weights are built – or even worth – the same! See what we mean.
The command and data handling system – a radiation-hardened 12 megahertz Mongoose V processor guided by intricate flight software – is the spacecraft’s “brain.” The processor distributes operating commands to each subsystem, collects and processes instrument data, and sequences information sent back to Earth. It also runs the advanced “autonomy” algorithms that allow the spacecraft to check the status of each system and, if necessary, correct any problems, switch to backup systems or contact operators on Earth for help.
For data storage, New Horizons carries two low-power solid-state recorders (one backup) that can hold up to 8 gigabytes each. The main processor collects, compresses, reformats, sorts and stores science and housekeeping (telemetry) data on the recorder – similar to a flash memory card for a digital camera – for transmission to Earth through the telecommunications subsystem.
The Command and Data Handling system is housed in an Integrated Electronics Module that also contains a vital guidance computer, the communication system and part of the REX instrument.
New Horizons is designed to retain heat like a thermos bottle. The spacecraft is covered in lightweight, gold-colored, multilayered thermal insulation – like a survival camping blanket – which holds in heat from operating electronics to keep the spacecraft warm. Heat from the electronics has kept the spacecraft operating at between 10-30 degrees Celsius (about 50-85 degrees Fahrenheit) throughout the journey.
New Horizons’ sophisticated, automated heating system monitors power levels inside the craft to make sure the electronics are running at enough wattage to maintain safe temperatures. Any drop below that operating level (about 150 watts) and it will activate small heaters around the craft to make up the difference. When the spacecraft was closer to Earth and the Sun, louvers (essentially heat vents) on the craft opened when internal temperatures were too high.
The thermal blanketing – 18 layers of Dacron mesh cloth sandwiched between aluminized Mylar and Kapton film – also helps to protect the craft from micrometeorites.
The propulsion system on New Horizons is used for course corrections and for pointing the spacecraft. It is not needed to speed the spacecraft to Pluto; that was done entirely by the launch vehicle, with a boost from Jupiter’s gravity.
The New Horizons propulsion system includes 16 small hydrazine-propellant thrusters mounted across the spacecraft in eight locations, a fuel tank, and associated distribution plumbing. Four thrusters that each provide 4.4 newtons of force (1 pound) are used mostly for course corrections. Operators also employ 12 smaller thrusters – providing 0.8 newtons (about 3 ounces) of thrust each – to point, spin up and spin down the spacecraft. Eight of the 16 thrusters aboard New Horizons are considered the primary set; the other eight comprise the backup (redundant) set.
At launch, the spacecraft carried 77 kilograms (170 pounds) of hydrazine, stored in a lightweight titanium tank. Helium gas pushes fuel through the system to the thrusters. Using a Jupiter gravity assist, along with the fact that New Horizons does not slow down or go into orbit around Pluto, reduced the amount of propellant needed for the mission.
New Horizons must be oriented precisely to collect data with its scientific instruments, communicate with Earth, or maneuver through space.
Attitude determination – knowing which direction New Horizons is facing – is performed using star-tracking cameras, Inertial Measurement Units (containing sophisticated gyroscopes and accelerometers that measure rotation and horizontal/vertical motion), and digital Sun sensors. Attitude control for the spacecraft – whether in a steady, three-axis pointing mode or in a spin-stabilized mode – is accomplished using thrusters.
The IMUs and star trackers provide constant positional information to the spacecraft’s Guidance and Control processor, which like the Command and Data Handling processor is a 12-MHz Mongoose V. New Horizons carries two copies of each of these units for redundancy. The star-tracking cameras store a map of about 3,000 stars; 10 times per second one of the cameras snaps a wide-angle picture of space, compares the locations of the stars to its onboard map, and calculates the spacecraft’s orientation. The IMU feeds motion information 100 times a second. If data shows New Horizons is outside a predetermined position, small hydrazine thrusters will fire to re-orient the spacecraft. The Sun sensors back up the star trackers; they would find and point New Horizons toward the Sun (with Earth nearby) if the other sensors couldn’t find home in an emergency.
Operators use thrusters to maneuver the spacecraft, which has no internal reaction wheels. Its smaller thrusters are used for fine pointing; thrusters that are approximately five times more powerful are used during the trajectory course maneuvers that guide New Horizons toward its targets. New Horizons spins – typically at 5 revolutions per minute (RPM) – during trajectory-correction maneuvers and long radio contacts with Earth, and while it “hibernated” during long cruise periods. Operators steady and point the spacecraft during science observations and instrument-system checkouts.
New Horizons’ X-band communications system is the spacecraft’s link to Earth, returning science data, exchanging commands and status information, and allowing for precise radiometric tracking through NASA’s Deep Space Network of antenna stations.
The system includes two broad-beam, low-gain antennas on opposite sides of the spacecraft, used mostly for near-Earth communications; as well as a 30-centimeter (12-inch) diameter medium-gain dish antenna and a large, 2.1-meter (83-inch) diameter high-gain dish antenna. The antenna assembly on the spacecraft’s top deck consists of the high, medium, and forward low-gain antennas; this stacked design provides a clear field of view for the low-gain antenna and structural support for the high and medium-gain dishes. Operators aim the antennas by turning the spacecraft toward Earth. The high-gain beam is only 0.3 degrees wide, so it must point directly at Earth. The wider medium-gain beam (4 degrees) is used in conditions when the pointing might not be as accurate. All antennas have Right Hand Circular and Left Hand Circular polarization feeds.
Data rates depend on spacecraft distance, the power used to send the data and the size of the antenna on the ground. For most of the mission, New Horizons has used its high-gain antenna to exchange data with the Deep Space Network’s largest antennas, 70 meters across. Even at Pluto, because New Horizons will be more than 3 billion miles from Earth and radio signals will take more than four hours to reach the spacecraft, it can send information at about 1,000 bits per second. It will take 16 months to send the full set of Pluto encounter science data back to Earth.
New Horizons is flying the most advanced digital receiver ever used for deep space communications. Advances include regenerative ranging and low power – the receiver consumes 66% less power than earlier deep-space receivers. The Radio Science Experiment (REX) to examine Pluto’s atmosphere is also integrated into the communications subsystem.
The entire telecom system on New Horizons is redundant, with two of everything except the high gain antenna structure itself.
New Horizons' electrical power comes from a single radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). The RTG provides power through the natural radioactive decay of plutonium dioxide fuel, which creates a huge amount of heat. Unlike fission or fusion nuclear reactions, the RTG simply harnesses the heat produced and turns it into electricity.
The New Horizons RTG, provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, carries approximately 11 kilograms (24 pounds) of plutonium dioxide. Onboard systems manage the spacecraft’s power consumption so it doesn’t exceed the steady output from the RTG, which has decreased by about 3.5 watts per year since launch.
Typical of RTG-based systems, as on past outer-planet missions, New Horizons does not have a battery for storing power.
At the start of the mission, the RTG supplied approximately 245 watts (at 30 volts of direct current) – the spacecraft’s shunt regulator unit maintains a steady input from the RTG and dissipates power the spacecraft cannot use at a given time. By July 2015 (when New Horizons flies past Pluto) that supply will have decreased to about 200 watts at the same voltage, so New Horizons will ease the strain on its limited power source by cycling science instruments during the encounter.
The spacecraft’s fully redundant Power Distribution Unit (PDU) – with 96 connectors and more than 3,200 wires – efficiently moves power through the spacecraft’s vital systems and science instruments.
The New Horizons science payload consists of seven instruments – three optical instruments, two plasma instruments, a dust sensor and a radio science receiver/radiometer. This payload was designed to investigate the global geology, surface composition and temperature, and the atmospheric pressure, temperature and escape rate of Pluto and its moons.
If an extended mission is approved, the instruments will probe additional Kuiper Belt Objects that the spacecraft can reach.
The payload is incredibly power efficient – with the instruments collectively drawing less than 28 watts – and represents a degree of miniaturization that is unprecedented in planetary exploration. The instruments were designed specifically to handle the cold conditions and low light levels at Pluto and in the Kuiper Belt beyond.
Mass: 4.5 kilograms (9.9 pounds)
Average Power: 4.4 watts
Development: Southwest Research Institute
Principal Investigator: Alan Stern, Southwest Research Institute
Purpose: Study atmospheric composition and structure
Alice is a sensitive ultraviolet imaging spectrometer designed to probe the composition and structure of Pluto’s dynamic atmosphere. Where a spectrometer separates light into its constituent wavelengths (like a prism), an “imaging spectrometer” both separates the different wavelengths of light and produces an image of the target at each wavelength. Alice’s spectroscopic range extends across both extreme and far-ultraviolet wavelengths from approximately 500 to 1,800 Angstroms. The instrument will detect a variety of important chemicals in Pluto’s atmosphere, and determine their relative abundances, giving scientists the first complete picture of Pluto’s atmospheric composition. Alice will search for an ionosphere around Pluto and an atmosphere around Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. It will also probe the density of Pluto’s atmosphere, and the atmospheric temperature of Pluto, both as a function of altitude.
Alice consists of a compact telescope, a spectrograph, and a sensitive electronic detector with 1,024 spectral channels at each of 32 separate spatial locations in its long, rectangular field of view. Alice has two modes of operation: an “airglow” mode that measures ultraviolet emissions from atmospheric constituents, and an “occultation” mode, where it views the Sun or a bright star through an atmosphere and detects atmospheric constituents by the amount of sunlight they absorb. Absorption of sunlight by Pluto’s atmosphere will show up as characteristic “dips” and “edges” in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum of light that Alice measures. This technique is a powerful method for measuring even traces of atmospheric gas.
A first-generation version of New Horizons' Alice (smaller and a bit less sophisticated) is flying aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, used to explore the escaping atmosphere and complex surface of a comet.
Mass: 10.3 kilograms (22.7 pounds)
Average Power: 6.3 watts
Development: Ball Aerospace Corporation, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Southwest Research Institute
Principal Investigator: Alan Stern, Southwest Research Institute
Purpose: Study surface geology and morphology; obtain surface composition and surface temperature maps
Ralph is the main “eyes” of New Horizons and is charged with making the maps that show what Pluto, its moons, and (potentially) other Kuiper Belt Objects look like. (The instrument is so named because it’s coupled with an ultraviolet spectrometer called Alice in the New Horizons remote-sensing package – a reference familiar to fans of “The Honeymooners” TV show.)
Ralph consists of three panchromatic (black-and-white) and four color imagers inside its Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), as well as an infrared compositional mapping spectrometer called the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA). LEISA is an advanced, miniaturized short-wavelength infrared (1.25-2.50 micron) spectrometer provided by scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. MVIC operates over the bandpass from 0.4 to 0.95 microns. Ralph’s suite of eight detectors – seven charge-coupled devices (CCDs) like those found in a digital camera, and a single infrared array detector – are fed by a single, sensitive magnifying telescope with a resolution more than 10 times better than the human eye can see. The entire package operates on less than half the wattage of an appliance light bulb.
Ralph will take images twice daily as New Horizons approaches, flies past and then looks back at the Pluto system. Ultimately, MVIC will map landforms in black-and-white and color with a best resolution of about 250 meters (820 feet) per pixel, take stereo images to determine surface topography, and help scientists refine the radii and orbits of Pluto and its moons. It will aid the search for clouds and hazes in Pluto’s atmosphere, and for rings and additional satellites around Pluto. It will also obtain images of Pluto’s night side, illuminated by “Charon-light.” At the same time, LEISA will map the amounts of nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, and frozen water and other materials, including organic compounds, across the sunlit surfaces of Pluto and its moons.
It will also let scientists map surface temperatures across Pluto and Charon by sensing the spectral features of frozen nitrogen, water and carbon monoxide.
Mass: 100 grams (3.5 ounces)
Average Power: 2.1 watts
Development: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Stanford University
Principal Investigators: Len Tyler and Ivan Linscott, Stanford University
Purpose: Measure atmospheric temperature and pressure (down to the surface); measure density of the ionosphere; search for atmospheres around Charon and other KBOs
REX consists only of a small printed circuit board containing sophisticated signal-processing electronics integrated into the New Horizons telecommunications system. Because the telecom system is redundant within New Horizons, the spacecraft carries two copies of REX. Both can be used simultaneously to improve the data return from the radio science experiment.
REX will use an occultation technique to probe Pluto’s atmosphere and to search for an atmosphere around Charon. After New Horizons flies by Pluto, its 2.1-meter (83-inch) dish antenna will point back at Earth. On Earth, powerful transmitters in NASA’s largest Deep Space Network antennas will beam radio signals to the spacecraft as it passes behind Pluto. The radio waves will bend according to the average molecular weight of gas in the atmosphere and the atmospheric temperature. The same phenomenon could happen at Charon if the large moon has a substantial atmosphere, though Earth-based studies indicate this is unlikely.
Space missions typically conduct this type of experiment by sending a signal from the spacecraft through a planet’s atmosphere and back to Earth. (This is called a “downlink” radio experiment.) New Horizons will be the first to use a signal from Earth – the spacecraft will be so far from home and moving so quickly past Pluto and Charon that only a large, ground-based antenna can provide a strong enough signal. This new technique, called an “uplink” radio experiment, is an important advance beyond previous outer planet missions.
REX will also measure the weak radio emissions from Pluto and other bodies the spacecraft flies by, such as Jupiter and Charon. Scientists will use the data to derive accurate globally averaged day-side and night-side temperature measurements. Also, by using REX to track slight changes in the spacecraft’s path, scientists will measure the masses of Pluto and Charon and possibly the masses of additional Kuiper Belt Objects. By timing the length of the radio occultations of Pluto and Charon, REX will also yield improved radii measurements for each body.
Mass: 8.8 kilograms (19.4 pounds)
Average Power: 5.8 watts
Development: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Principal Investigator: Andy Cheng, Applied Physics Laboratory
Purpose: Study geology; provide high-resolution approach and highest-resolution encounter images
LORRI, the “eagle eyes” of New Horizons, is a panchromatic high-magnification imager, consisting of a telescope with an 8.2-inch (20.8-centimeter) aperture that focuses visible light onto a charge-coupled device (CCD). It’s essentially a digital camera with a large telephoto telescope – only fortified to operate in the cold, hostile environs near Pluto.
During the encounter, LORRI images will be New Horizons' first of the Pluto system, starting about 180 days before closest approach. Pluto and its moons still resemble little more than bright dots, but these system-wide views will help navigators keep the spacecraft on course and help scientists refine their orbit calculations of Pluto and its moons. Approximately 60 days before closest approach – around mid-May 2015 – LORRI images will surpass Hubble-quality resolution, providing never-before-seen details each day. At closest approach, LORRI will image select sections of Pluto's sunlit surface at football-field-size resolution, resolving features at about 50 meters across.
This range of images will give scientists an unprecedented look at the geology on Pluto and its moons– including the number and size of craters on each surface, revealing the history of impacting objects in that distant region. LORRI will also yield important information on the history of Pluto’s surface, search for activity such as geysers on that surface, and look for hazes in Pluto’s atmosphere. LORRI will also provide the highest resolution images of any Kuiper Belt Objects New Horizons would fly by in an extended mission, should NASA approve one.
LORRI has no color filters or moving parts – operators take images by pointing the LORRI side of the spacecraft directly at their target. The instrument’s innovative silicon carbide construction keeps its mirrors focused through the extreme temperature dips New Horizons experiences on the way to, through, and past the Pluto system.
Mass: 3.3 kilograms (7.3 pounds)
Average Power: 2.3 watts
Development: Southwest Research Institute
Principal Investigator: David McComas, Southwest Research Institute
Purpose: Study solar wind interactions and atmospheric escape
The SWAP instrument will measure interactions of Pluto with the solar wind – the stream of fast charged particles flowing from the Sun. The incredible distance of Pluto from the Sun required the SWAP team to build the largest-aperture instrument ever used to measure the solar wind.
Pluto’s small gravitational acceleration (approximately 1/16 of Earth’s gravity) leads scientists to think that about 75 kilograms (165 pounds) of material escape its atmosphere every second. The atmospheric gases that escape Pluto’s weak gravity leave the planet as neutral atoms and molecules. These atoms and molecules are ionized by ultraviolet sunlight (similar to Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere). Once they become electrically charged, the ions and electrons are “picked up” and carried away by the solar wind. In the process, these pickup ions gain substantial energy (thousands of electron-volts). This energy comes from the solar wind, which is correspondingly slowed down and diverted around Pluto. SWAP measures low-energy interactions, such as those caused by the solar wind. By measuring how the solar wind is perturbed by the interaction with Pluto’s escaping atmosphere, SWAP will determine the escape rate of atmospheric material from Pluto.
At the top of its energy range SWAP can detect some pickup ions (up to 6.5 kiloelectron volts, or keV). SWAP combines a retarding potential analyzer (RPA) with an electrostatic analyzer (ESA) to enable extremely fine, accurate energy measurements of the solar wind, allowing New Horizons to measure minute changes in solar wind speed. The amount of Pluto’s atmosphere that escapes into space provides critical insights into the structure and destiny of the atmosphere itself.
Mass: 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds)
Average Power: 2.5 watts
Development: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Principal Investigator: Ralph McNutt Jr., Applied Physics Laboratory
Purpose: Study the density, composition, and nature of energetic particles and plasmas resulting from the escape of Pluto’s atmosphere
PEPSSI, the most compact, lowest-power directional energetic particle spectrometer flown on a space mission, will search for neutral atoms that escape Pluto’s atmosphere and become charged by their interaction with the solar wind. It will detect the material that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere (such as molecular nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane), which break up into ions and electrons after absorbing the Sun’s ultraviolet light, and stream away from Pluto as “pickup” ions carried by the solar wind.
The instrument will likely get its first taste of Pluto’s atmosphere when the planet is still millions of miles away. By using PEPSSI to count particles, and knowing how far New Horizons is from Pluto at a given time, scientists will be able to tell how quickly the planet’s atmosphere is escaping and gain new information about what the atmosphere is made of.
PEPSSI is a classic “time-of-flight” particle instrument: particles enter the detector and knock other particles (electrons) from a thin foil; they zip toward another foil before hitting a solid-state detector. The instrument clocks the time between the foil collisions to tell the particle’s speed (measuring its mass) and figures its total energy when it collides with the solid-state detector. From this, scientists can determine the composition of each particle. PEPSSI can measure energetic particles up to 1,000 kiloelectron volts (keV), many times more energetic than what SWAP can measure. Together the two instruments make a powerful combination for studying the Pluto system.
Mass: 1.9 kilograms (4.2 pounds)
Average Power: 5 watts
Development: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder
Principal Investigator: Mihaly Horanyi, University of Colorado at Boulder
Purpose: Measure concentration of dust particles in outer solar system
Designed and built by students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the SDC detects microscopic dust grains produced by collisions among asteroids, comets, and even Kuiper Belt Objects during New Horizons’ long journey. Officially a New Horizons Education and Public Outreach project, SDC is the first science instrument on a NASA planetary mission to be designed, built and “flown” by students. The SDC counts and measures the sizes of dust particles, producing information on the collision rates of such bodies in the outer solar system. SDC will also be used to search for dust in the Pluto system; such dust might be generated by collisions of tiny “impactors” on Pluto’s small moons.
The instrument includes two major pieces: an 18-by-12-inch detector assembly, which is mounted on the outside of the spacecraft and exposed to the dust particles; and an electronics box inside the spacecraft that, when a hit occurs on the detector, deciphers the data and determines the mass and speed of the particle. Because no dust detector has ever flown beyond 18 astronomical units from the Sun (nearly 1.7 billion miles, about the distance from Uranus to the Sun), SDC data is giving scientists an unprecedented look at the sources and transport of dust in the solar system.
With faculty support, University of Colorado students have been distributing and archiving data from the instrument, and lead a comprehensive education and outreach effort to bring their results and experiences to classrooms of all grades.
In June 2006 the instrument was named for Venetia Burney, who at age 11 offered the name “Pluto” for the newly discovered ninth planet in 1930.
Electrical power for the New Horizons spacecraft and science instruments is provided by a single radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, supplied by the Department of Energy. RTGs are used on missions that cannot use solar power, yet require a proven, reliable power supply that can produce several kilowatts and operate in space for many years.
New Horizons' journey will take it more than 4 billion miles from Earth, where the Sun is just a very bright star in the dark sky. Besides taking longer than 4 hours to reach Pluto and nearby Kuiper Belt objects, light from the Sun is 1,000 times fainter there than at Earth.
Conducting missions safely is NASA's top priority. NASA informed the public about New Horizons' use of an RTG by publishing a detailed Environmental Impact Statement - or EIS - and several fact sheets. The Final EIS, which includes public comments on the Draft EIS and NASA's responses to those comments, was released in July 2005.
A description of the RTG power system on New Horizons mission and the final EIS can be found below:
|New Horizons Power||October 2004||PDF/57 K|
|Final Environmental Impact Statement (Vol. I)||July 2005||PDF/2.3 MB|
|Final Environmental Impact Statement (Vol. II)||July 2005||PDF/3.5 MB|
You need pretty large antennas to send data over billions of miles - and fortunately, NASA has them.
The New Horizons mission operations team communicates with the spacecraft through NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) of antenna stations. The DSN consists of facilities in California's Mojave Desert; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. These stations are separated in longitude by about 120 degrees, assuring that any spacecraft can be observed without interruption as Earth rotates.
Visit the DSN Web site for more information.
All commands sent to New Horizons must pass a rigorous development and review process to ensure the safety of the spacecraft. The mission operations team works closely with the instrument, science and spacecraft teams to develop the commands that perform New Horizons' activities. After the command sequences are tested on a New Horizons simulator, the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, sends them to the DSN, which is operated and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Data received on Earth through the Deep Space Network is sent to the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at APL, where data are "unpacked" and stored. The mission operations and instrument teams scour the engineering data for performance trend information, while science data are copied to the Science Operations Center at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. At the Science Ops Center, data pass through "pipeline" software that converts them from instrumental units to scientific units, based on calibration data obtained for each instrument. Both the raw and calibrated data files are formatted for New Horizons science team members to analyze. Both the raw and calibrated data, along with various ancillary files (such as documents describing the pipeline process or the instruments) will be archived at the Small Bodies Node of NASA's Planetary Data System.
New Horizons is on a one-way journey to the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Unlike missions that return to Earth, New Horizons sends back all of its data using a radio transmitter and its 83-inch (2.1-meter) diameter radio antenna. It receives commands over this link, and returns both science data and information on the spacecraft's temperature and power.
All commands sent to the New Horizons spacecraft must first pass a rigorous development and review process to ensure the safety of the spacecraft. The science team will work closely with the instrument mission operations and spacecraft teams to develop the commands that trigger New Horizons' scientific activity. After the command sequences are tested on the ground, they will be sent by the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, to NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), which is operated and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Usually, New Horizons must be oriented in a particular direction to take data with its scientific instruments. For example, its various telescopes must be accurately pointed at a specific target (such as a location on the surface of Pluto). New Horizons has an advanced guidance and control (G&C) system for determining its orientation. An inertial measurement unit (IMU), which is a sophisticated gyroscope, provides relatively coarse positional information and keeps the spacecraft stable. Star-tracker cameras employing charge-coupled devices (CCDs) image the sky, and the positions of the detected stars are used to acurately determine the orientation of the spacecraft. The star tracker feeds star-position information to the G&C computer, which compares the observed position to the commanded position. If the difference is outside some predetermined tolerance, small hydrazine thrusters will fire to re-orient the spacecraft to the desired position.
The thrusters provide the only mechanism for maneuvering the New Horizons spacecraft, and the amount of hydrazine thruster fuel is carefully watched to ensure that the mission's scientific objectives are fullfilled. Besides the small thrusters that are used to fine-point the spacecraft, thrusters that are approximately five times more powerful are used during trajectory correction maneuvers (TCMs) that keep New Horizons on the proper path to its targets.
New Horizons carries seven scientific instruments, which collect several types of data. (The instrument names and main functions are described in the science payload section) As an instrument makes an observation, data is transferred to a solid-state recorder (similar to a flash memory card for a digital camera), where they are compressed (if necessary), reformatted and transmitted to Earth through the spacecraft's radio telecommunications system.
A major challenge for the New Horizons mission is the relatively low "downlink" rate at which data can be transmitted to Earth, especially when you compare it to rates now common for high-speed Internet surfers.
During the Jupiter flyby in February 2007, New Horizons sent data home at about 38 kilobits per second (kbps), which is slightly slower than the transmission speed for most computer modems. The average downlink rate after New Horizons passes Pluto (and sends the bulk of its encounter data back to Earth) is approximately 2,000 bits per second, a rate the spacecraft achieves by downlinking with both of its transmitters through NASA's largest antennas. Even then, it will take until late 2016 to bring down all the encounter data stored on the spacecraft's recorders.
Since NASA's Deep Space Network has to track other missions besides New Horizons, the team plans to produce a lossy compressed browse data set that can be sent down more quickly. The browse dataset will be downlinked before the end of 2015; the complete dataset will be downlinked after the browse dataset.
Data received on Earth through the Deep Space Network will be sent to the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at APL, where data will be "unpacked" and stored. The mission operations and instrument teams will scour the engineering data for performance trend information, while science data will be copied to the Science Operations Center at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. At the Science Ops Center, data will pass through "pipeline" software that converts the data from instrumental units to scientific units, based on calibration data obtained for each instrument. Both the raw and calibrated data files will be formatted for New Horizons science team members to analyze. Both the raw and calibrated data, along with various ancillary files (such as documents describing the pipeline process or the science instruments) will be archived at the Small Bodies Node of NASA's Planetary Data System.