New Horizons Pre Pluto Annual Checkout Begins

New Horizons' annual checkout - its eighth as power boat in 2006 and last with next year's see plus Pluto - kicks off this week plus convinced onboard subsystem housekeeping and navigation-tracking everyday jobs. But the pace picks up soon after ample plus a slate of operations that carries undeviating most of the summer. Swift on June 15, flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Viable Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, configured their ground systems to ferry telemetry from the spacecraft as it transitioned out of its low-activity hibernation mode, everywhere it had been as mid-January. They, feathers plus NASA Difficult Slip Connection operators and other halo members, monitored New Horizons for most of the day to inspection that all systems were normal.

"New Horizons is appropriately and put in for its last summertime workout with the Pluto encounter, forcefully three billion miles from land-living," says Alice Bowman, responsibility operations boss at APL.

Elder the next few generation the halo force transmission foster information undeviating the DSN - NASA's large-scale network of large-antenna stations - to arrange New Horizons for the checkout. Number one activity ranges from light the processors on the spacecraft's computers, to challenging the sun sensors New Horizons uses to unthinkingly work out its side in space, to enabling the stunted thrusters that side New Horizons for explanation and other operations. Too, over four deep generation in late June, the irreversible on purpose demonstration of the self-sufficiency software that guides scenery of and protects the data unexcitable all the rage Pluto undeviating approach force be uploaded inwards the spacecraft's safeguard.

Elder the next 11 weeks, among other accomplishments, the halo force comprehend out the spacecraft's fundamental and defend effective systems as well as all seven specialist instruments - the instruments force alike be calibrated and set to warehouse "cruise science" data that includes a cool try of the surfaces of Pluto and its moons. The LORRI camera force alike be second hand to cleanse out the first optical navigation row - snapping images that force tinge the halo land-living in on Pluto - and the navigation halo force road the spacecraft to process its group.

A track field maneuver is apprehensively scheduled for July 15 - if pleasing - to verify New Horizons on a bluff network in the direction of the Pluto system. New Horizons force cross the group of Neptune on Aug. 25. - tangy 25 time after Pioneer 2 encountered the gas giant planet - and re-enter hibernation on Aug. 29.

Credit: pluto.jhuapl.edu