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Science of New Horizons
The first robotic space mission to visit the distant planet Pluto and frozen objects in the Kuiper Belt is explained by the project's managers and scientists in this NASA news conference from the agency's Washington headquarters on Dec. 19.

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Pluto spacecraft
The Pluto New Horizons spacecraft, destined to become the first robotic probe to visit Pluto and its moon Charon, arrives at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in advance of its January blastoff.

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Mars probe leaves Earth
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifts off aboard a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral's Complex 41.

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Launch of Atlas 5!
The fifth Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket blasts off to deploy the Inmarsat 4-F1 mobile communications spacecraft into orbit. (2min 35sec file)
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Extended launch movie
An extended length clip follows the Atlas 5 launch from T-minus 1 minute through ignition of the Centaur upper stage and jettison of the nose cone. (6min 43sec file)
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Onboard camera
An onboard video camera mounted to the Atlas 5 rocket's first stage captures this view of the spent solid-fuel boosters separating.
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Press site view
This view of the Atlas 5 launch was recorded from the Kennedy Space Center Press Site. (1min 27sec file)
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Atlas 5 preview
Preview the launch of Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 rocket carrying the Inmarsat 4-F1 communications spacecraft with this narrated animation package. (3min 47sec file)
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Launch of Atlas 5
The Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket launches at 7:07 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral carrying the AMERICOM 16 communications spacecraft. (6min 22sec file)
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Press site view
The sunrise launch of Atlas 5 is shown in this view from the Kennedy Space Center press site at Complex 39. (QuickTime file)
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Rocket rollout
Riding on its mobile launching platform, the Atlas 5 rocket is rolled from its assembly building to the launch pad at Complex 41 just hours before the scheduled liftoff time carrying AMC 16. (4min 41sec file)
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By any standards, a long journey into night
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 14, 2006

Even with a powerful Atlas 5 rocket, launching New Horizons directly to Pluto would take some 14 years. Instead, NASA plans to shave five years off the trip by launching New Horizons on a trajectory that will carry it past Jupiter in early 2007. Streaking 1.4 million miles from the planet's cloud tops at 47,000 mph, New Horizons will gain a gravitational boost amounting to an additional 9,000 mph. That's what gets the probe to Pluto by July 14, 2015.

But to take advantage of Jupiter, NASA must launch New Horizons by Feb. 6. While the 2006 launch window extends to Feb. 14, a launch in the last week of the window would result in a Pluto flyby in 2020. Jupiter is not an option at all if the flight slips to 2007.

Pluto currently is on the outbound leg of its elliptical orbit, moving away from the sun. With every year that passes, 77,000 square miles of Pluto's surface disappears into shadow, lost to view from a passing spacecraft. Equally pressing, astronomers believe Pluto's atmosphere will literally freeze out and fall to the surface in the coming years as the planet recedes from the warmth of the sun.

"Some of those atmospheric species are actually going to freeze up just like when you put water in a ice tray and put it in a freezer," Weaver said. "The little layer of water vapor above it, all that freezes out into ice cubes. Well, the same thing is probably going to happen to Pluto. We don't know exactly when it's going to happen, sometime probably within the next few decades."

In short, the science community feels a fair amount of pressure to get New Horizons off the ground before Feb. 6.

NASA originally hoped to launch the mission Jan. 11, but the flight was put on hold for a last-minute investigation to resolve lingering questions about a fuel tank problem that cropped up last year.

Because the New Horizons rocket is the first Atlas 5 to be equipped with five solid-fuel boosters, an RP-1 first stage fuel tank - the part of the rocket solid-fuel boosters attach to - was deliberately over pressurized to demonstrate its ability to handle excessive "loads." The test tank cracked at about 90 psi, twice the normal flight pressure, and an investigation was ordered.

Flight tanks, including the one in the New Horizons rocket, were boroscoped and found to be in good condition. NASA ordered a second inspection to make sure and a Lockheed Martin official said "the Atlas team is absolutely ready to go." NASA agreed the Atlas 5 had a positive margin of safety, but details of a flight readiness review Thursday are not yet known, including how many engineers might have dissented.

If all goes well, the huge rocket's Russian-built RD-180 first stage engine and five solid-fuel boosters will roar to life at 1:24 p.m. Tuesday, the opening of a one-hour 59-minute launch window. While a typical Atlas 5 climbs above its launch gantry in 12 seconds or so, the New Horizons rocket, with its lightweight payload, will take just six seconds as it thunders skyward and then arcs out over the Atlantic Ocean.

Using a hydrogen-powered Centaur second stage, the Atlas will put New Horizons in an elliptical "parking orbit" with an apogee, or high point, of 191 miles and a perigee, or low point, of 102 miles. Twenty-two minutes later, the Centaur will reignite, boosting New Horizons into an orbit around the sun carrying it as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

For the final kick needed to send the craft to Jupiter, a solid-fuel Boeing Star 48 rocket motor will ignite about 43 minutes after liftoff and burn for about a minute and a half. New Horizons will separate from the spent booster a few minutes later, on its own for the remainder of the long voyage to Pluto.

"The launch carries us out over the Atlantic. By the time we are over the Indian Ocean, we've acquired enough velocity to send us on our way to Pluto," said Project Manager Glen Fountain. "Leaving Earth, the New Horizons will be traveling at eight miles per second. Eight hours later, the spacecraft will pass the orbit of the moon. Remember that the Apollo astronauts took some three days to cover that distance."

Here are launch milestones at a glance (in minutes and seconds after launch):

  • Guidance to inertial: T-00:08.0
  • RD-180 main engine ignition: T-00:02.7
  • Engine operation and thrust at flight level: 00:00.0
  • Liftoff: 00:01.1
  • Booster jettison (1,2): 01:46.7
  • Booster jettison (3,4,5): 01:48.2
  • Nose cone fairing jettison: 03:23.4
  • First stage main engine cutoff: 04:27.6
  • First stage/Centaur second stage separation 04:33.6
  • Centaur first main engine start (MES1): 04:43.6
  • Centaur first main engine cutoff (MECO1): 10:06.2
  • Centaur second main engine start (MES2): 32:22.6
  • Centaur second main engine cutoff (MECO2): 42:02.2
  • Centaur/third-stage separation: 42:15.2
  • Third stage Star48B engine start: 42:52.2
  • Star48B engine burnout: 44:20.1
  • Spacecraft separation 47:47.2
Mission managers are not just taking advantage of Jupiter for a gravity assist flyby. They're going to use the planet for an end-to-end test of the spacecraft's instruments, using the encounter as a dress rehearsal for Pluto.

"We will be the eighth mission to Jupiter," Stern said. "One of the dirty little secrets of New Horizons is we'll be returning more bits (of data) from Jupiter than from Pluto because we have much greater bandwidth. ... We have a wide variety of experiments planned to test out our instruments, but also to fill in the gaps and to answer some of the questions the Galileo mission left us with."

NASA's hugely successful Galileo orbiter mapped and studied Jupiter's major moons, its radiation environment and its cloudy atmosphere in unprecedented detail. But an antenna malfunction limited the amount of data it could beam back to Earth, forcing scientists to forego some planned observations of the atmosphere that required enough pictures to make movies. New Horizon will fill in many of those blanks.

In addition, the spacecraft's trajectory will carry it down Jupiter's magnetotail as it flies away into deep space, giving scientists an unprecedented chance to study the teardrop-shaped region of space around Jupiter that is shaped and defined by the planet's powerful magnetic field.

"Our route of flight from Jupiter to Pluto takes us directly down Jupiter's magnetotail out to a thousand jovian radii," Stern said. "This is just a spectacular opportunity for magnetospheric science, nothing like this has ever been flown at any planet. Even at the Earth, there's never been an equivalent fly through of a magnetotail like this."

New Horizons will photograph Jupiter's aurora, its major satellites and a modest ring discovered by the Voyager spacecraft.

"So it's going to be a busy time," Stern said.

But once past Jupiter, NASA plans to put New Horizons into electronic hibernation, fully waking up just once a year for detailed health checks. It will cross the gulf between Jupiter and Pluto spinning at 5 rpm with its high-gain antenna constantly pointed toward Earth.

"The spacecraft will be put to sleep into a hibernation mode with very few subsystems active after we complete the Jupiter gravity assist," said David Kusnierkiewicz, mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins. "This will conserve some of the useful operating lifetime of the electronics."

New Horizons will, however, broadcast simple diagnostic "beacon" tones that will be listened to once a week by NASA's Deep Space Network of tracking antennas. A coded "green" tone will indicate the spacecraft is healthy. One of seven coded "red" tones will be beamed back if a problem is detected.

"This will be the first operation we've used such a beacon mode, to broadcast the status of the spacecraft and its health back to Earth," Kusnierkiewicz said. "We will listen to this beacon about once a week during the period from Jupiter to Pluto in order to make sure the spacecraft is healthy ... and we'll respond accordingly."

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