The PI's Perspective: The Science Never Sleeps

Written by Copernical Team Thursday, 03 October 2024 12:30

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Boulder CO (SPX) Oct 03, 2024

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is healthy and speeding across the Kuiper Belt. Today, we crossed a distance marker of note, passing 60 times as far from the Sun as Earth is. Put in perspective, that means we're almost twice as far out as Pluto was when we explored it! This summer, we had three sets of groundbased astronomical observing dates, each three days long, on the giant Japanese Sub

The PI's Perspective: The Science Never Sleeps
by Alan Stern | New Horizons Mission Principal Investigator
Boulder CO (SPX) Oct 03, 2024

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is healthy and speeding across the Kuiper Belt. Today, we crossed a distance marker of note, passing 60 times as far from the Sun as Earth is. Put in perspective, that means we're almost twice as far out as Pluto was when we explored it!

This summer, we had three sets of groundbased astronomical observing dates, each three days long, on the giant Japanese Subaru Telescope atop the mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The purpose was to use that telescope and its state-of-the-art wide-field imager to search for new Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) for New Horizons to study. Those observations concluded on Aug. 1, and the data, literally terabytes of it, is being analyzed. That's a big job, and we expect preliminary results by the end of the year.

Earlier results from past Subaru observations were recently detailed in two scientific papers, one led by our Japanese mission collaborator Fumi Yoshida, and one led by Canadian New Horizons co-investigator Wes Fraser. Aside from a chance to highlight the international collaboration that strengthens our second extended mission, these papers detail the discoveries of hundreds of new KBOs, and even more importantly, distant KBOs ahead on our path at almost 90 times as far from the Sun as Earth, a distance New Horizons will cover over the next decade.

You can read more about these discoveries on the New Horizons and Subaru Telescope websites.

The New Horizons team reported these and many other new Kuiper Belt and KBO results at an international conference on the solar system beyond Neptune, held in Taipei, Taiwan, this summer.

The next major activity for the New Horizons spacecraft will be to enter hibernation on Oct. 3. Coincidently, that will be the day after the spacecraft passes the 60 astronomical unit (AU) marker (that is, 60 times as far from the Sun as Earth).

Hibernation will last until April 2, and help us conserve fuel for studying the Kuiper Belt and the Sun's outer heliosphere. While in hibernation, New Horizons will continue to take round-the-clock measurements of the charged-particle environment of the Sun's outer heliosphere and the dust environment of the Kuiper Belt. So even when our spacecraft sleeps, our science data collection never stops!

When New Horizons wakes up, it'll begin sending back the data it accumulated while hibernating, and our team will prepare it to receive new flight software that gives it the capability to operate safely for many more years. That flight software, called "Autonomy," is essentially an onboard autopilot that watches for anomalies and deals with them in real time. Autonomy has to do that because many problems require faster remedies than our flight controllers can provide from Earth.

This Autonomy upgrade deals with the decreasing power available to our spacecraft as the plutonium in our nuclear battery declines, due to radioactive decay, over the next 15-plus years. The new Autonomy software also deals with the increasing faintness of the Sun, as picked up by the onboard sun sensors used to help point the spacecraft.

We plan to transmit the new Autonomy software to New Horizons next summer, after a thorough battery of tests in early 2025 on our mission simulator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland - home of our mission operations center.

Besides more KBOs, another important, upcoming science study addresses the termination shock. This is where the solar wind from the Sun slows down to subsonic speeds as it begins to interact with the interstellar medium beyond our solar system. New Horizons carries a range of scientific capabilities that NASA's venerable Voyagers - the first spacecraft to cross the termination shock - do not, and can add a great deal to our understanding of the termination shock when we cross it, which could be as soon as 2027. Our science team, under the direction of Project Scientist Pontus Brandt of APL, is already making detailed plans for this study.

These developments are exciting, as are the many other scientific publications emerging from New Horizons data on distant KBOs and the Sun's heliosphere.

Before I wrap up, I'm sad to report that one of our longest serving and most knowledgeable mission control center personnel, Dr. Helen Hart, passed away on Sept. 8. Helen joined New Horizons before we launched in 2006, and was widely considered a fount of technical knowledge about spacecraft operations. She is deeply missed, and I want to pass on heartfelt condolences from everyone on our team to her husband and family. On long missions like New Horizons, teams have to deal with these kinds of losses, and they are never easy.

As I close here, I want to remind you that we've updated our mission website here to include new details about New Horizons activities and our extended mission into the Kuiper Belt and the Sun's outer heliosphere - so check it out!

And that's my update for now. I'll write again early in the new year. In the meantime, I hope you'll always keep exploring - just as we do!