The James Doohan FarewellJames Doohan gets his name sent to PlutoJanuary 19, 2006We've just got word from Chris Doohan that James Doohan's name was sent on DVD (along with many others), on the New Horizons launch today.This rocket is the fastest rocket in history. It will reach the moons orbit in only 9 hours, then slingshot itself towards Jupiter. It won't reach Pluto for nine years. After probing Pluto and it's moons, it will fly into through Kuiper belt and eventually out of the Solar System.God's speed, Jimmy.
New Horizons MemorabiliaLaunched on January 19th, 2006, New Horizons is headed towards a historic encounter with Pluto and its moons next year. From there, New Horizons will survey any Kuiper Belt objects of opportunity along its path and then head out of the solar system, becoming the fifth spacecraft to do so. In addition to a suite of scientific instruments, New Horizons also carries the ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, a Florida & Maryland state quarter, a piece of Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne, and an American flag. These will doubtless confuse any extraterrestrial salvagers!
New Horizons has come out of hibernation and is now activehttp://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
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New Horizons will begin its Pluto science campaign in January, and will make its closest approach to Pluto in July. It will explore the outer-most and most-populated region of the solar system, the Kuiper belt, which is full of rocky, icy objects that have remained largely unchanged since the formation of the solar system. "This is the place that this spacecraft was built to operate, and these are the operations that this team has waited a decade to actually go and execute," Stern said. "So it's game time."NASA launched the New Horizons mission in 2006 on a $700 million mission to be the first spacecraft ever to see Pluto and its five moons up close. The piano-size spacecraft is powered by a nuclear power source and has travelled nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km) to reach Pluto in a mere nine years, making it the fastest space probe ever launched). It has spent two-thirds of its journey in a hibernation state that has both prolonged the life of the instruments and reduced staff costs on the ground.While New Horizons has gone through 18 hibernation periods, sleeping for about 1,873 days in all, this is the last one before it begins taking data on the Pluto system.For 20 weeks of its flyby of Pluto, New Horizons will provide better photos of Pluto and its moons than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, Stern said. In analogy, if the spacecraft were flying over a city it would be able to count the individual buildings on the ground. New Horizons may also identify as-yet-unknown moons or rings around Pluto.
Piano size space-mobile with nuclear power source?
Electrical power. The spacecraft has a nuclear power supply to generate electricity over its many years of life. Plutonium-238 fuel is used to power a radioisotope thermal generator (RTG), which is the probe's long-life battery. An RTG converts heat from naturally decaying plutonium into electricity. The RTG uses plutonium dioxide ceramic pellets as a heat source and solid-state thermocouples that convert the plutonium's heat energy to electricity.
Electrical power. The spacecraft has a nuclear power supply to generate electricity over its many years of life.
