Thousand days to Pluto

[radag...@gmail.com]

From the Spacedaily.com website:

1,000 Days On The Road To Pluto

New Horizons has been in flight for nearly 1,000 days, and is more
than one-third of the way to our destination planet at 32 Astronomical
Units.
by Alan Stern
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 08, 2008
It's hard to believe, but Oct. 15 will be the 1,000th day of flight
for New Horizons. And in that time we've traveled so far that only
four other spacecraft - Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 - have
ventured farther.
Can you believe it's been this long? Sometimes it seems so, but other
times, it seems like we just blasted off from Florida on that cool
afternoon of Jan. 19, 2006.

Of course, it's been a busy 1,000 days for everyone involved. After an
exciting launch day none of us will ever forget, we spent the first
four months of flight checking out our spacecraft systems and making
the initial course corrections to put us right down the middle of the
pike to our Jupiter flyby aim point.

In June 2006, we conducted a surprise flyby of small asteroid 2002
JF56 (which has since been named "132524 APL") to test our ability to
track moving targets.

Immediately after that, we turned our attention to payload checkouts
and initial calibrations, which we completed in the fall of 2006, and
then we went right into planning for our Jupiter flyby. The Jupiter
flyby, which culminated in closest approach on Feb. 28, 2007, was a
spectacular success, and New Horizons continued in data-taking mode
through the end of last year.

Since then, we have been alternately hibernating and operating the
spacecraft in its annual checkouts. Presently, we are nearing the
halfway point of Annual Checkout 2, which began Sept. 2 and will end
on Dec. 16.

Following ACO-2, we will hibernate until next summer, when we wake our
"sleeping beauty" to conduct the first dress rehearsal of the Pluto
encounter. This fast pace of activity has made the time fly since
launch, and by this time next year, more than 40 percent of our 9½-
year journey will be behind us.

New Horizons has been in flight for nearly 1,000 days, and is more
than one-third of the way to our destination planet at 32 Astronomical
Units.

But that's getting ahead of the story, because rather than
concentrating on next year's journey, which I will do in an upcoming
update, I want to instead brief you on ACO-2's progress and our near-
term plans.

Over the past five weeks, as our spacecraft hurtled on through the
wild black yonder beyond Saturn, New Horizons received major upgrades
to all three of its software systems: Command and Data Handling
(called C and DH), Guidance and Control (G and C), and Autonomy, which
is our fault detection and correction software "autopilot."

These upgrades were radioed up to the spacecraft to fix various minor
(and two pretty major) bugs discovered since launch, add some new
capabilities, protect the three codes against certain fault conditions
and put us in position to conduct the Pluto system encounter.

In fact, for both C and DH and G and C, encounter versions of the
software are on board. We still need to add a few autonomy upgrades,
but we are now executing well over 95 percent of the encounter code
capabilities.

Planning for these upgrades began after the Jupiter flyby. First we
identified dozens of code fixes and enhancements that we wanted to
make; we then modified the existing code to their new versions, which
in turn was followed by months of ground-based testing of the new
software packages.

The process culminated with the three uploads in September, which went
as smoothly as anyone could have dreamed - a testament to the care
that our mission operations team put into these delicate "brain
transplants."

And since the new codes were started, everything has worked as
advertised - which is a testament to the hard work and talent of the
New Horizons engineers who designed and tested the codes over the past
year.

With the code upgrades behind us, we have turned our attention to a
busy October of subsystem and instrument checkouts, instrument
calibrations, and a four-day test of the spacecraft's "encounter mode"
- something we have not yet tested very much in flight but need to
before the first encounter rehearsal next August.

The rapid-fire pace for the New Horizons team won't settle down until
November, when we concentrate on several weeks of cruise science
observations of the interplanetary environment between Saturn and
Uranus using our PEPSSI, SWAP and Student Dust Counter instruments.

We'll stop collecting data after Thanksgiving and prepare New Horizons
and its payload for another long sleep, which is set to begin Dec. 16.

Well, that's the update on the spacecraft and flight project for now,
but before I close, I have four short items of project news:

The sister instrument to our Alice ultraviolet spectrometer, flying on
the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet mission, performed perfectly
in an encounter with the asteroid Steins on Sept. 5. In fact, in that
encounter, that Alice instrument obtained the first far and extreme
ultraviolet spectra of any asteroid. Go Alice team!

The Great Planet Debate meeting, held at the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory Aug. 14-16, brought together more than 100
educators and scientists to continue the debate over what is and is
not a planet.

As a post-meeting press release states, there is still a lot of
controversy among scientists - and it seems the only point beyond
contention is that there is contention between researchers on Pluto's
status and the status of other dwarf planets. So the debate continues.

A full-scale model of New Horizons has been placed in the Udvar-Hazy
Center of the National Air and Space Museum, and it will be dedicated
later this month with speeches and toasts. Of the thousands of
spacecraft launched since Sputnik, only a few dozen are represented
with models or replicas in the National Air and Space Museum, and we
are very proud that New Horizons is in such historic company.

NASA presented our entire project team with a Group Achievement Award
for the successful development and launch of New Horizons. With that
also came a Public Service Medal - the highest distinction NASA can
bestow on a person on a robotic space mission - for our project
manager, Glen Fountain!

Finally, just a reminder before I close: During most weeks we post a
few brief, one-sentence Web updates on New Horizons activities, or on
something you may not know about the Pluto system or the Kuiper Belt.

You can see these updates at any time on www.twitter.com/NewHorizons2015
- you also can sign up for your own Twitter account at www.twitter.com
and check the box to follow "NewHorizons2015." so you get updates
whenever we post them.

Well, that catches you up on what the spacecraft and project team have
been doing, and what's coming up in the next few weeks. I'll be back
with more news in mid- or late November. In the meantime, keep on
exploring, just like we do!