A NASA
probe bound for the planet Pluto and the distant icy realm of the Kuiper Belt is spending its final days on Earth as it nears
its Jan. 17 launch date.
"We're in
great shape," New
Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern
told SPACE.com this week. "We have a very clean vehicle."
New Horizons
cleared a Flight Readiness Review Thursday as the days tick down toward liftoff
of the first-ever flyby mission to Pluto, mission officials said, adding that a
series of mission news and science briefings will be broadcast on NASA TV
beginning at 1:00 p.m. EST (1800 GMT).
Rollout of
the spacecraft atop its Lockheed Martin-built Atlas 5 rocket is set for Monday
morning at its Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch pad in Florida. Booster fueling to follow shortly
after, NASA officials added.
The
spaceflight's launch window opens at 1:24 p.m. EST (1824 GMT) on Jan. 17 and
runs through Feb. 14, though the spacecraft must lift off by the end of January
to take advantage of a gravity boost from Jupiter that could shave three years
off its spacecraft. If all goes well, the probe should swing past Pluto and its
moons in 2015, researchers said.
"Everything
is very positive and everybody is getting very excited," said David Kusnierkiewicz, New Horizons mission systems engineer with
the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns
Hopkins University,
which built the spacecraft for NASA. "It's a good feeling...all the official
approvals are in."
NASA
officials confirmed this week that the White House's Office of Science,
Technology and Policy (OSTP) gave its final approval on New Horizon's radioisotope
thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts heat from decaying plutonium
into power for the Pluto spacecraft.
The RTG is
a leftover spare from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently studying
Saturn and its many moons, Stern has told SPACE.com.
Stern said
the New Horizons probe's Jan. 17 launch target also happens to coincide with
the anniversary of the death of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, who first
observed the distant world in 1930 and died in 1997.
"It's a
complete coincidence, but interesting," Stern said.
The launch
is also bounded between the 100th anniversaries of Tombaugh's birth (Feb.
18), as well as that of Gerard Kuiper (Dec. 7) -
after whom the Kuiper Belt and its objects are named.
Family members of both Kuiper and Tombaugh are
expected to be on hand for the launch.
Both Stern
and Kusnierkiewicz don't plan to relax once New
Horizons launches on its way, and will head immediately to the spacecraft's
mission control center at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
"This thing
has been a lot of hard work and it's gratifying to get to this point," said Kusnierkiewicz, who has spent the last five years watching
over the New Horizons spacecraft. "It's kind of exciting that first all this
hardware starts to show up and then one day, you turn around and it's at the
launch site."
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