NASA's New
Horizons probe bound for Pluto is
headed for a Jupiter flyby, its camera eyes wide open, in preparation for its
swing out towards the fringe of the solar
system.
New
Horizons began taking black-and-white images of Jupiter and scanning the planet's icy
moon Callisto in the infrared this week as it prepares for a close
encounter with the gas giant next
month.
"They're
certainly all we could have hoped for," New Horizons principal
investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,
Colorado, said Thursday of the new Jupiter images. "We're still 100 million
kilometers out. We're going to get 50 times closer, but they are very nice."
The images
are expected to be released next week. NASA
officials also plan to hold a press briefing on the New Horizons mission on
Jan. 18.
New
Horizons has been billed as NASA's fastest mission to date. The probe is set to
make its closest pass by Jupiter on Feb. 28, just over one year after its Jan.
19, 2006 launch, and swing within 1.4 million miles (2.3 million
kilometers) of the gas giant [image].
NASA's Galileo
mission to Jupiter took about six years before it reached the planet in
1995. But that spacecraft went into orbit around the gas giant and spent eight
years studying Jupiter and its many moons. While New Horizons will make 700
individual observations of Jupiter over six months, the probe is hunting a far
more distant quarry.
New
Horizon's Jupiter flyby, and subsequent gravity boost, will shave a full three
years off the probe's journey to Pluto, though Stern attributes that to the
January 2006 launch that put the spacecraft on target for a 2015 rendezvous [flight
plan map].
"We are
really healthy," Stern said of the spacecraft. "We don't have a single device
that's broken on the spacecraft."
About the
size of grand piano, New Horizons carries seven
instruments to study Jupiter, Pluto and
its moons. The probe may also survey the distant icy Kuiper
Belt Objects if its mission is ultimately extended. New Horizons is
speeding through the solar system at about 44,537 miles (71,675 kilometers)
per hour and has already shot
past Mars, the Asteroid Belt
and snapped images of Jupiter [image]
and a space
rock formerly known as Asteroid 2002 JF56 [image].
"It's
called APL," said Stern, whose along with his team named the asteroid after the
Applied Physics Laboratory at Maryland's Johns Hopkins University, which is
overseeing the New Horizons mission for NASA. "The 2002 JF56 provisional
designation is now history."
The probe
is expected to make its closest pass by the distant planet and its trio of
moons on July 14, 2015. But first, the spacecraft must swing past Jupiter.
Stern said
mission controllers have been working round-the-clock on New Horizon's Jupiter
flyby since October, and are gearing up for a busy rendezvous in late February.
"We are now
in the late stages of planning the closest approach," Stern told SPACE.com,
adding that the flight plan will be uploaded to New Horizons in mid-February.
"The spacecraft is going to get busy."
It will
also be a busy time for Stern too, who is the not only the principle
investigator for New Horizon's Alice ultraviolet spectrometer instrument, but
also the lead for a similar tool aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta
probe bound for a 2014
visit to the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko [image].
"The same
week that New Horizons is at Jupiter, Rosetta is doing its Mars flyby," said
Stern, adding that a busy year lies ahead.
Stern said
the New Horizons team ended 2006 with a celebration of sorts by honoring Venetia Burney,
a nearly 88-year-old Englishwoman who - as an 11-year-old girl - gave Pluto its
name in 1930.
New Horizon
team members named the probe's Student Dust Counter instrument after Burney,
with Stern and mission co-investigators presenting her with a plaque on Dec.
19 [image].
"It
was fun to meet Venetia in person and to hear about how she came to name Pluto
so long ago," Stern wrote in a mission status update last week. "She's healthy
and witty and wishing for a chance to be at our Pluto encounter in 2015; that
seems like something we should make happen."
NASA's New
Horizons briefing will be broadcast on NASA TV and is slated to begin at 1:00
p.m. EST (1800 GMT).
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