[meteorite-list] New Horizons Marks a 'Year Out' with a Successful Course Correction

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 14:18:19 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201407162118.s6GLIJGO029825_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20140715.php

New Horizons Marks a 'Year Out' with a Successful Course Correction
July 15, 2014

New Horizons performed a slight course correction yesterday, a short
maneuver designed to correct the spacecraft's arrival time - a year from
now - at the precisely intended aim point at Pluto.

The maneuver - during which New Horizons fired its thrusters for just
under 88 seconds - sped the craft up by about 2.4 miles per hour and
keeps it on track for a flight past Pluto that culminates /next/ July
14. "If we hadn't performed this maneuver, we would have arrived at
Pluto about 36 minutes later than we wanted to," said Mark Holdridge,
New Horizons encounter mission manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. "Making the adjustment now means
we won't have to perform a bigger maneuver - and use more of the
spacecraft's fuel - down the road."

While the maneuver itself happened onboard the spacecraft at 10:45 p.m.
EDT on July 14, data indicating that the burn went as planned arrived in
the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at APL at 4:30 a.m. EDT on
July 15 - after traveling nearly four hours from the spacecraft, which
is nearly 2.7 billion miles from home, through NASA's Deep Space Network.

"It was a great burn, performed flawlessly" said Alan Stern, New
Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute,
Boulder, Colo. "You could say that New Horizons just lit a little candle
for its one year out anniversary."

It was the spacecraft's sixth course correction maneuver since launch in
January 2006, and the first since 2010. New Horizons mission design team
lead Yanping Guo, from APL, noted that the maneuver marked the first
change in the Pluto encounter trajectory since 2008, now that the team
has better information on the predicted locations of Pluto and its
largest moon, Charon. "That information is critical to making sure the
sequence of science observations, which will be programmed into New
Horizons' computers, goes exactly as planned," Guo said.

Holdridge added that New Horizons will take images of the Pluto system
as it approaches Pluto, beginning early next year, and navigation and
flight dynamics experts will them to design additional maneuvers to
further refine the spacecraft's course.

Did you know?

The first commands to perform the thruster burn were transmitted to the
spacecraft on July 11, and adjusted slightly on July 14. The
87.52-second burn, which sped New Horizons up by 1.08 meters per second
(about 2.4 miles per hour), used about a quarter of a kilogram of fuel ?
less than one-half of a percent of the approximately 53 kilograms still
onboard the spacecraft.
Received on Wed 16 Jul 2014 05:18:19 PM PDT