New Horizons NASA's Mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt
Asteroids and Jupiter
Helen Hart joined the mission operations team at APL in spring 2005, just as the team began launch simulations, planning for spacecraft and instrument checkouts, contingency simulations and launch-readiness reviews. Soon after liftoff they started checking out the spacecraft’s subsystems and instruments.
Hart revels in the way the team “scrambled” to meet an early flight opportunity: passing 100,000 kilometers from asteroid 2002 JF56, later christened APL. “With that encounter came a chance to check out the special moving target guidance control that we wouldn't have a decent chance to use again until Pluto, but only if we scrambled,” she says. On June 13, 2006, the newly commissioned Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera took a clear image of the small asteroid, proving that the control technique worked.
Based on that success, mission leaders decided to start fully planning for the 2015 Pluto encounter.
“Most of us were expecting a bit of a respite after the Jupiter encounter, when we entered a long hibernation phase,” says New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of APL. “But then we realized that it would be better to continue working on the planning for the Pluto encounter while the lessons learned from Jupiter are still fresh in our minds. So we've been keeping our noses to the grindstone for an extra two years to make sure we have the best possible flyby encounter at Pluto.”