Course correction keeps New Horizons on path to Pluto
Thu Jul 1, 2010 at 18:13 UTC
A short but important course-correction maneuver kept New Horizons on track to reach the 'aim point' for its 2015 encounter with Pluto.
The deep-space equivalent of a tap on the gas pedal, the June 30 thruster-firing lasted 35.6 seconds and sped New Horizons up by just about one mile per hour. But it was enough to make sure that New Horizons will make its planned closest approach 12,500 kilometers (7,767 miles) above Pluto at 11:49 UTC on July 14, 2015.
Commands for the preprogrammed maneuver were transmitted to the spacecraft's computers on June 24; the burn went off as planned Wednesday at 19:00 UTC. New Horizons was more than 2.4 billion kilometers (1.49 billion miles) from Earth at the time of the maneuver; at that distance, nearing the orbit of Uranus, a radio signal from the spacecraft needs more than 2 hours, 13 minutes to reach Earth.
Mission operators at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., received confirmation of the successful firing through NASA's Deep Space Network antenna station near Madrid, Spain.
| Source: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory | |
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