[LINK] "The New Horizons science mission to the Pluto-Charon system is about to begin"

[rfmcdonald]

The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla writes at length of the New Horizons probe, fast-approaching its rendezvous with dwarf planet Pluto and their family. What instrumentation does the probe carry? What images will it take, and when? What will the images look like? All are here.

It's been a long journey, but it's nearly over: New Horizons is just about ready to begin its science mission to Pluto, Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. The spacecraft has spent most of its decade-long trip napping in a hibernation mode that required little energy from either the spacecraft or its human controllers, but this snoozy phase ends this weekend. On December 7 at 02:30 UT ( December 6 at 18:30 PT), New Horizons will wake up for the final time; it will remain awake and alert for two years. The Planetary Society's Mat Kaplan will be hosting a video event during the wakeup, so you can watch with us as we wait for that all-important beep that signals that New Horizons is ready to begin work.

New Horizons' flyby of Pluto happens on July 14, 2015 at 11:50 UT, but it will begin gathering science data in January and will not finish returning all of the data until late 2016.

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The mission at Pluto is divided into several phases. In each phase, New Horizons will focus on the kind of science appropriate to its range from Pluto. New Horizons is traveling so fast that the actual close-approach part of the encounter happens in an incredibly short period; nearly all of the most important goals for the mission are met in the time from 2.5 hours before to 1 hour after closest approach. One exception to this is global image covering: Pluto takes about a week (6.4 days) to rotate, so the best global maps will be composed of images gathered beginning a couple of days before closest approach. The science observations for the encounter have been planned with both prime and backup observations and with redundancy among instruments to make sure the mission's goals are met if one observation or even one instrument fails. The observations focus primarily on Pluto, Charon, and Nix: rather than scatter observations across both Nix and Hydra, they chose to characterize Nix well and Hydra less well. The other two moons, Styx and Kerberos, are even smaller than Nix and Hydra (hence, more difficult to observe) and were discovered quite late in the mission planning process; they'll be imaged in group shots, optical navigation imagery and satellite system movies, but don't have science observations devoted to them specifically.