U.Colorado-Boulder Student-Built Instrument Set To Launch On MissionTo Pluto Jan. 17 (Forwarded)

Office of News Services
University of Colorado-Boulder
Boulder, Colorado

Contact:
Mihaly Horanyi, (303) 492-6903
Jim Scott (303) 492-3114

Dec. 27, 2005

CU-Boulder Student-Built Instrument Set To Launch On Mission To Pluto Jan.
17

The University of Colorado at Boulder's long heritage with NASA planetary
missions will continue Jan. 17 with the launch of a student space dust
instrument on the New Horizons Mission to Pluto from Florida's Kennedy
Space Center.

As the first student-built instrument ever selected by the space agency to
fly on a planetary mission, the CU-Boulder Student Dust Counter, or SDC,
will monitor the density of dust grains in space as New Horizons buzzes to
Pluto and beyond. The dust grains are of high interest to researchers
because they are the building blocks of the solar system's planets, said
Research Associate Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and
Space Physics, principal investigator for the student instrument.

The student team hopes to identify as-yet-undetected clumps of dust in the
dust disk of the solar system caused by the gravity of the outer planets,
said Horanyi, who is also a professor in the physics department. "This
will help us to understand the formation of our own planets, as well as
those seen in dust disks around other stars," he said.

"Just as importantly, this effort will provide students with an important
role in a pioneering space mission for years to come," said Horanyi.

Instruments and experiments designed and built for NASA missions by
CU-Boulder's LASP since the 1970s have visited Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In addition, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, now
en route to Mercury, is carrying a $7 million device designed and built by
CU-Boulder's LASP.

The SDC detector is a thin, plastic film resting on a honeycombed aluminum
structure the size of a cake pan mounted on the outside of the spacecraft,
said Horanyi. A small electronic box inside the spacecraft will function
as the instrument's "brain" to assess each individual dust particle that
strikes the detector during the mission.

The researchers are particularly interested in the dust that New Horizons
will encounter in the Kuiper Belt, a vast region beyond the orbit of
Neptune that contains thousands of ancient, icy objects, said Horanyi.
Kuiper Belt objects are thought to contain samples of ancient material
formed in the solar system billions of years ago.

Microscopic-sized dust grains hitting the SDC will create unique
electrical signals, allowing the CU-Boulder students to infer the mass of
each particle, said CU-Boulder doctoral student David James, who has been
working on the electronics of the dust detection system on SDC for the
past two years. While the spacecraft will be in "sleep mode" for much of
the cruise to Pluto, CU-Boulder's dust detector will remain turned on to
catch space dust during the journey, James said.

The SDC team is comprised of CU-Boulder students from electrical and
computer engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, journalism
and business who designed and fabricated the instrument under the
supervision of LASP faculty and staff. The students will share their
findings and mission experiences with students and the public around the
world via the Internet and public presentations.

"I never dreamed I would get the chance to actually work on a space
mission as an undergraduate student," said Elizabeth Grogan, who began
working on the SDC as software engineer while a senior at CU-Boulder. She
now works at LASP as a research assistant on the New Horizons effort. "I
got much more hands-on experience on this project than I could have ever
gotten in a classroom," Grogan said.

The National Academy of Sciences has ranked the exploration of Pluto, its
moon, Charon, and the Kuiper Belt among the highest priorities for space
exploration, citing their importance in advancing the understanding of the
solar system.

"We expect that several generations of CU-Boulder students will be
involved in the mission during the next two decades," Horanyi said.

The New Horizons mission is led by the Southwest Research Institute's
Department of Space Studies in Boulder under the direction of Alan Stern.
New Horizons was designed and built at Johns Hopkins University's Applied
Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., which will operate the spacecraft for
NASA. The piano-sized probe will launch on a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5
rocket from Cape Kennedy to begin its10-year journey to Pluto.

The 1,000-pound probe, which will be the fastest spacecraft ever launched,
will approach Pluto and Charon as early as summer 2015. In addition to the
dust counter, the instrument suite includes two cameras, two imaging
spectrometers and two particle spectrometers to gather data on the
surfaces, atmospheres and temperatures of Pluto, Charon and the Kuiper
Belt objects.

Horanyi said a group of current and former CU-Boulder students who worked
on SDC are going to the Florida launch, many paying their own way from
around the world. "Many of these students have moved on to other
institutions and careers, but they are excited to see this mission finally
launch," he said. "If all goes well, we will be having another reunion in
10 years when the spacecraft reaches Pluto."

For more information on CU-Boulder's SDC effort, visit the Web at
http://lasp.colorado.edu/programs_mi..._site/sdc.html

For information about New Horizons visit
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu