  The New Horizons spacecraft was launched on 19 January 2006. The spacecraft
was designed to provide a platform for seven instruments that will collect and
return data from Pluto in 2015. The design drew on heritage from previous
missions developed at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
(APL) and other missions such as Ulysses. The trajectory design imposed
constraints on mass and structural strength to meet the high launch
acceleration needed to reach the Pluto system prior to the year 2020. The
spacecraft subsystems were designed to meet tight mass and power allocations,
yet provide the necessary control and data handling finesse to support data
collection and return when the one-way light time during the Pluto flyby is 4.5
hours. Missions to the outer solar system require a radioisotope thermoelectric
generator (RTG) to supply electrical power, and a single RTG is used by New
Horizons. To accommodate this constraint, the spacecraft electronics were
designed to operate on less than 200 W. The spacecraft system architecture
provides sufficient redundancy to provide a probability of mission success of
greater than 0.85, even with a mission duration of over 10 years. The
spacecraft is now on its way to Pluto, with an arrival date of 14 July 2015.
Initial inflight tests have verified that the spacecraft will meet the design
requirements.
