Gallery: Photos: How NASA Set New Horizons on Its Path to Pluto
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The interplanetary probe spins in flight to save fuel. Here, NASA engineers test New Horizons at 60 revolutions per minute. They used small weights to correct imbalances.
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Alan Stern, right, is the principal investigator of New Horizons. He’s holding a 1994 Hubble image of Pluto and a few of its moons. Ed Stone, left, was the project scientist for the Voyager mission. He’s holding an image of Neptune taken by that probe in 1989.
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The January 2006 launch of New Horizons on an Atlas V began an almost 10-year journey across 3 billion miles of space, into what planetary scientists call the unexplored third zone of our solar system.
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The New Horizons probe, seen here at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory undergoing instrument testing in October 2005. It weighs just 944 pounds and operates on less than 230 watts of electricity.
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Designed to operate billions of miles from the sun for at least 17 years, New Horizons is powered by what’s called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (the pencil-shaped protrusion in the drawing). It contains 24 pounds of plutonium-238.
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Although the high-gain antenna (seen here from above) is 83 inches in diameter, the probe’s recorder can stream only 300 bits per second. As a result, it will take nearly 16 months for the scientific data and photographs to be transmitted to Earth.
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On December 6, 2014, Alice Bowman, the operations manager for the mission, waits for a signal that the probe is electronically alive and transmitting. Since its launch, New Horizons has spent about two-thirds of its flight time in hibernation to reduce wear and tear and the risk of system failure.
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Deputy project scientist Leslie Young, at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. After the flyby of Pluto and its moons, New Horizons will continue transmitting through at least late 2016. Then, if approved by NASA, the probe will be put on a billion-mile trajectory toward an ancient celestial body, called a planetesimal, in the Kuiper Belt.
