[meteorite-list] A Busy Year Begins for New Horizons

[Ron Baalke]

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20140106.php

A Busy Year Begins for New Horizons
January 6, 2014

With Pluto encounter operations now just a year away, the New Horizons
team has brought the spacecraft out of hibernation for the first of
several activities planned for 2014.

Mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel,
Md., "woke" New Horizons on Jan. 5. Over the next two weeks the team
will test the spacecraft's antenna and repoint it toward Earth; upload
commands into the onboard Guidance and Control and Command and Data
Handling systems, including a check on the backup inertial measurement
unit and update of the spacecraft's navigational star charts; and
conduct some navigational tracking, among other routine maintenance duties.

"We've had busier wakeup periods, but with long-distance Pluto encounter
operations starting only a year from now, every activity is important,"
says APL's Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager.

The pace of operations picks up significantly later this year. In late
June the team will wake New Horizons for two and a half months of work,
including optical-navigation ("homing") activities using the Long-Range
Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to refine the probe's course to Pluto. The
team will also check out the spacecraft's backup systems and science
instruments; carry out a small course correction to trim up New
Horizons' approach trajectory and closest-approach timing at Pluto; and
gather some science data by measuring the variations in Pluto's and
Charon's brightness as they rotate.

New Horizons is placed back into electronic slumber on Aug. 29, a "rest"
that lasts only until Dec. 7. "From there it will stay awake for two
years of Pluto encounter preparations, operations and data downlinks,"
Bowman says.

Distant-encounter operations begin Jan. 12, 2015.

"The future has finally arrived," says New Horizons Principal
Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,
Colo. "After all the time and miles in the rearview mirror, the turning
of the calendar page last week to 2014 means we'll be exploring the
Pluto system next year!"