New Horizons: Science Never Sleeps

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspective.php

The PI's Perspective
Science Never Sleeps
Alan Stern
September 2, 2009

We put New Horizons back into hibernation
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20090828.php last week, on
Aug. 27. This event signaled the completion of our third active
spacecraft and payload checkout, which occupied us for most of July
and
August.

Active Checkout Three ("ACO-3") went very well, its objectives
completed
with no serious glitches. Our spacecraft and payload are healthy, on
course and ready for a set of three hibernation periods that will
stretch into late May.

Twice during the next nine months we'll wake the spacecraft up for
about
10 days at a time to re-point its antenna toward Earth and conduct a
few
minor maintenance activities. The first of these two wakeups will
occur
Nov. 9-18. Until then, New Horizons will report in with status beacon
checks every Monday and telemetry sessions every other Thursday that
update us on key spacecraft engineering parameters.

Meanwhile, our science and flight teams are reviewing ACO-3 data,
scoping the list of activities for next summer's ACO-4 (already!) and
finalizing our Pluto near-encounter activities sequence. The science
team is also planning a selection process for teams to search for our
target Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs); proposals will be due early next
year, with searches to take place in 2011 and 2012. And we've also
been
planning a science workshop at the Space Telescope Science Institute
in
Baltimore next May.

To get a feel for why we say
"Science Never Sleeps," take a look at our Pluto encounter planning
schedule for this fall. As you can see, our small team uses the
spacecraft hibernation periods to get this kind of planning and
testing
done in preparation for Pluto encounter. Unlike our baby out there in
deep space, we're not hibernating at all on the ground. (Click on the
graphic to enlarge.)/*

New Horizons is now almost 14.4 astronomical units from the Sun, and
will cross the halfway point between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus
next week. We?re now firmly in the ?Centaur region? where escaped KBOs
roam between the giant planets. (In fact, we regularly check to see if
there is a chance encounter coming with any Centaurs, but so far, no
known Centaur is passing closer than about half a billion kilometers
from New Horizons.)

That's my update for now; thanks for following our journey to a new
frontier. I'll be back in touch in November, around the next time we
wake up our spacecraft. In the meantime, keep on exploring, just as we
do!

- Alan Stern/