New Horizons - Background

Background

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers mission category, larger and more expensive than Discovery missions but smaller than the Flagship Program. The cost of the mission (including spacecraft and instrument development, launch vehicle, mission operations, data analysis, and education/public outreach) is approximately 650 million USD over 15 years (from 2001 to 2016). An earlier proposed Pluto mission – Pluto Kuiper Express – was cancelled by NASA in 2000 for budgetary reasons. Further information relating to an overview with historical context can be found at the IEEE website and gives further background and details, with more details regarding the Jupiter fly-by.

The spacecraft was built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The mission's principal investigator is Alan Stern (NASA Associate Administrator, formerly of the Southwest Research Institute).

Overall control, after separation from the launch vehicle, is performed at Mission Operations Center (MOC) at the Applied Physics Laboratory. The science instruments are operated at the Clyde Tombaugh Science Operations Center (T-SOC) in Boulder, Colorado. Navigation, which is not real-time, is performed at various contractor facilities, while the navigational positional data and related celestial reference frames are provided by the Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station through Headquarters NASA and JPL; KinetX is the lead on the New Horizons navigation team and is responsible for planning trajectory adjustments as the spacecraft speeds toward the outer Solar System.

New Horizons was originally planned as a voyage to what was the only unexplored planet in the Solar System. When the spacecraft was launched, Pluto was still classified as a planet, later to be reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Some members of the New Horizons team, including Alan Stern, disagree with the IAU definition and still describe Pluto as the ninth planet. Pluto's satellites Nix and Hydra also have a connection with the spacecraft: the first letters of their names, N and H, are the initials of "New Horizons". The moons' discoverers chose these names for this reason, in addition to Nix and Hydra's relationship to the mythological Pluto.

In addition to the scientific equipment, there are several cultural artifacts traveling with the spacecraft. These include a collection of 434,738 names stored on a compact disc, a piece of Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne, and an American flag, along with other mementos.

To commemorate the discovery of Pluto, one ounce of the ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh are aboard the spacecraft. An exploration-themed coin, a Florida state quarter, is included officially as a trim weight but also as might be symbolically appropriate to pay Charon (mythology), the ferryman of the dead to the realm of Pluto. One of the science packages (a dust counter) is named after Venetia Burney, who, as a child, suggested the name Pluto after the planet's discovery.