Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
Michael Buckley
Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
240-228-7536
RELEASE: 07-55
NASA SPACECRAFT GETS BOOST FROM JUPITER FOR PLUTO ENCOUNTER
LAUREL, Md. - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed a
flyby of Jupiter early this morning, using the massive planet's
gravity to pick up speed for its 3-billion mile voyage to Pluto and
the unexplored Kuiper Belt region beyond.
"We're on our way to Pluto," said New Horizons Mission Operations
Manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. "The swingby was a success; the
spacecraft is on course and performed just as we expected."
New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter at 12:43 a.m.
EST, placing the spacecraft on target to reach the Pluto system in
July 2015. During closest approach, the spacecraft could not
communicate with Earth, but gathered science data on the giant
planet, its moons and atmosphere.
At 11:55 a.m. EST mission operators at APL established contact through
NASA's Deep Space Network and confirmed New Horizons' health and
status.
The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons is gaining nearly
9,000 mph from Jupiter's gravity - accelerating to more than 52,000
mph. The spacecraft has covered approximately 500 million miles since
its launch in January 2006 and reached Jupiter faster than seven
previous spacecraft to visit the solar system's largest planet. New
Horizons raced through a target just 500 miles across, the equivalent
of a skeet shooter in Washington hitting a target in Baltimore on the
first try.
New Horizons has been running through an intense six-month long
systems check that will include more than 700 science observations of
the Jupiter system by the end of June. More than half of those
observations are taking place this week, including scans of Jupiter's
turbulent atmosphere, measurements of its magnetic cocoon, surveys of
its delicate rings, maps of the composition and topography of the
large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and a detailed look at
volcanic activity on Io.
"We designed the entire Jupiter encounter to be a tough test for the
mission team and our spacecraft, and we're passing the test," says
New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern from the Southwest
Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We're not only learning what we
can expect from the spacecraft when we visit Pluto in eight years,
we're already getting some stunning science results at Jupiter - and
there's more to come."
While much of the close-in science data will be sent back to Earth
during the coming weeks, the team also downloaded a sampling of
images to verify New Horizons' performance.
The outbound leg of New Horizons' journey includes the first-ever trip
down the long "tail" of Jupiter's magnetosphere, a wide stream of
charged particles that extends more than 100 million miles beyond the
planet. Amateur backyard telescopes, the giant Keck telescope in
Hawaii, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory
and other ground and space-based telescopes are turning to Jupiter as
New Horizons flies by, ready to provide global context to the
close-up data New Horizons gathers.
New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program of
medium-class spacecraft exploration projects. The Applied Physics
Laboratory, Laurel, Md., manages the mission for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate, Washington. The mission team also includes
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the U.S. Department of
Energy, Washington; Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.; and
several corporations and university partners.
For the latest news and images from the New Horizons mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
-end-
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