New Horizons Team Plans Jupiter Encounter

New Horizons Mission News
November 21, 2003
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu

New Horizons Team Plans Jupiter Encounter

The main goal of NASA's New Horizons mission may be to explore Pluto-
Charon and the Kuiper belt beginning in 2015, but first the mission
plans to fly by the solar system's largest planet, Jupiter, during
February*-March 2007. The Jupiter flyby would be used by New
Horizons to provide a gravitational assist that shaves years off the trip
time to Pluto-Charon and the Kuiper belt.

During the flyby, plans call for New Horizons to use its instrument
payload - consisting of cameras, spectrometers, radiometers, and
space plasma and dust sensors - to make a variety of scientific
observations. Toward that end, the New Horizons team has formally
kicked off its planning of the Jupiter flyby science observations.
Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) and the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) lead the mission. Major
partners include Ball Aerospace, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center and the California Institute of
Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"Every spacecraft must check out its instruments and pointing
capabilities in flight prior to reaching its target," says mission
project scientist Dr. Hal Weaver of APL. "By virtue of the gravity
assist maneuver at Jupiter, New Horizons has a unique opportunity to
do its check out on a very worthy and exciting scientific target."

Great Opportunity

"New Horizons presents NASA's next opportunity to study the complex
and fascinating Jupiter system," says Dr. Alan Stern, principal
investigator of the New Horizons mission and director of the SwRI
Space Studies Department. "To accomplish its gravity-assist maneuver
on the way to Pluto-Charon, our spacecraft will venture at least
three times closer to Jupiter than the Cassini spacecraft did in
late 2000 when it used Jupiter for a gravity assist on the way to
Saturn."

Astronomically speaking, Stern says, New Horizons will fly just
outside of the edge of Jupiter's large, planet-sized Galilean moon,
Callisto. From its closer range, New Horizons will perform a number
of Jupiter system studies not possible from Cassini's greater flyby
distance.

Science planning is going forward to ready the mission for its
scheduled 2006 launch, at the same time that required environmental
and safety reviews are also being done. Through the summer of 2004,
the New Horizons science team will prioritize its Jupiter science
activities from objectives provided by team members as well as
interested scientists from around the world. To accomplish this
objective, Stern has appointed mission co-investigator and imaging
team lead Dr. Jeff Moore of the NASA Ames Research Center to lead
the New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Sequencing Team (JEST).

"New Horizons will be the next mission to Jupiter, and it is
carrying a sophisticated instrument complement," says Moore. "We
intend to cull and then schedule the most critical needs for
scientific observations of Jupiter, its satellites, its
magnetosphere and its rings.

"Following that," Moore continued, "the mission team will design and
implement a five-month-long sequence of observations of the Jupiter
system to be made from late 2006 through early 2007 as the
spacecraft approaches and then recedes from Jupiter."

Scientific Bonus

"Exploring the Jupiter system is a coveted scientific bonus for New
Horizons," adds Weaver. "It also provides us with a valuable
opportunity to check out the instrument payload and many of the
flyby procedures we will later use at Pluto-Charon."

New Horizons is proceeding toward a January 2006 launch, with a
planned arrival at Pluto and its moon, Charon, in the summer of
2015. The 465-kilogram (1,025-pound) spacecraft will characterize
the global geology and geomorphology of Pluto and Charon, map the
surface compositions and temperatures of these worlds, and study
Pluto's atmospheric composition and structure. It will then visit
one or more of the icy, primordial bodies in the Kuiper belt, where
it will make similar investigations.

In July 2002, the National Research Council's Decadal Survey for
Planetary Science ranked the reconnaissance of Pluto-Charon and the
Kuiper belt as its highest priority for a new start mission in
planetary science, citing the fundamental scientific importance of
these bodies to advancing understanding of our solar system.

Note: Visit http://www.swri.org/press/jest.htm or the New Horizons
Images section for an artist's concept of New Horizons at Jupiter.
More information on the New Horizons mission is available at
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu More information on Pluto-Charon and the
Kuiper belt is available at http://www.plutoportal.net

(From a Southwest Research Institute news release)

Ron,

Has the New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission spacecraft design
been finalized? Has construction begun? If so, can you tell me
roughly when that occurred? Thanks!

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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