The scientific instruments all work, and the tiny spacecraft passed its “shake and bake” tests. Next stop is the launching pad for NASA’s Pluto-bound spacecraft.
NASA’s first mission to the most distant planet is just about ready for its Jan. 11 launch, officials said this month.
Boulder scientists who helped plan New Horizons said they expect the mission to transform science’s view of the icy globe.
Today’s best photographs of Pluto show a fuzzy orange ball in space nearly 3 billion miles away. New Horizons will fly within 6,000 miles of the planet, but it will take a decade to get there.
“If you make an analogy with Earth, our best images of Pluto are so crude, you couldn’t see the continents, and we’re going to go down to almost spy-satellite resolution,” said Alan Stern, a scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder.
Stern, 47, has spent much of the past 20 years trying to persuade NASA to send a probe to Pluto and then helping to plan the $675 million mission. “This is the fastest spacecraft ever launched, but that’s because it has so far to travel,” he said. The craft will reach speeds of 75,000 mph.
If New Horizons, now awaiting launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, lifts off in January, it will arrive at Pluto sometime in 2015.
If weather or other problems force mission planners to use the last part of their launch window in February, the probe will fly direct to Pluto without a “gravity boost” from Jupiter. That would take at least three years longer, Stern said.
Kurt Lindstrom, NASA’s New Horizons program executive, said the mission is the first to explore the icy outer realm of the solar system, where objects are little changed since the solar system’s start, 4 billion years ago.
Comets come from the Kuiper Belt region where Pluto is found, he said, and the icy objects that remain there are probably similar to the building blocks of the rocky inner planets.
Besides that, Lindstrom said, everybody just seems to want to know more about Pluto.
“It’s the last planet we haven’t looked at,” Lindstrom said. “Because it’s so far away, nobody thought we’d ever get to see it.”
Stamatios Krimigis, a researcher from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, helped plan the Pluto mission. But at 67, he wonders if he’ll be around when the craft sends images back to Earth.
“They may have to send me the data … 6 feet under,” he said. “If I’m alive, I’ll be delighted.”
New Horizons will launch on a powerful Atlas V rocket, built by Lockheed Martin engineers in Jefferson County. The spacecraft weighs about 1,000 pounds, compared with the almost 5,000-pound Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched on an Atlas V in August.
Lockheed also built the tiny engine, fueled by radioactive plutonium, that will provide power for New Horizons.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
