The New Horizon is NASA's fastest spacecraft, and has traveled for more than 9 years and 3 billion miles.
The New Horizons mission team from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland have been patiently waiting for the New Horizons spacecraft project to finally reach its destination point – the planet Pluto.
In its April 17 edition, Astronomy Magazine online reported that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is three months from returning to humanity the first-ever close-up images and scientific observations of distant Pluto and its system of large and small moons.
The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons has traveled a longer time and farther away — more than nine years and 3 billion miles — than any space mission in history to reach its primary target. Its flyby of Pluto and its system of at least five moons on July 14 will complete the initial reconnaissance of the classical solar system.
“Scientific literature is filled with papers on the characteristics of Pluto and its moons from ground-based and Earth-orbiting space observations, but we’ve never studied Pluto up close and personal,” said John Grunsfeld of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “In an unprecedented flyby this July, our knowledge of what the Pluto system is really like will expand exponentially, and I have no doubt there will be exciting discoveries.”
According to Astronomy Magazine, the envisioned July flyby caps a five-decade-long era of reconnaissance that began with Venus and Mars in the early 1960s, and continued through first looks at Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn in the 1970s, and Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. Reaching this third zone of our solar system — beyond the inner rocky planets and outer gas giants — has been a space science priority for years.
“New Horizons is one of the great explorations of our time,” said Hal Weaver at APL.
According to NASA, the spacecraft’s work doesn’t end with the July flyby. Because it gets one shot at its target, New Horizons is designed to gather as much data as it can, as quickly as it can, taking about 100 times as much data on close approach as it can send home before flying away.
