NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed
a flyby of Jupiter early Wednesday morning, using the
massive planet's gravity to pick up speed on its
3-billion-mile voyage to Pluto and the unexplored Kuiper
Belt region beyond.
"We're on our way to Pluto," said New Horizons mission
operations manager Alice Bowman, of Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics
Laboratory. "The swingby was a success; the spacecraft
is on course and performed just as we expected."
New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter
at 12:43 a.m., threading an "aim point" that puts it on
target to reach the Pluto system in July 2015. During
closest approach the spacecraft was out of touch with Earth
— busily gathering science data on the giant planet,
its moons and atmosphere — but by 11:55 a.m. mission
operators at APL had established contact with New Horizons
through NASA's Deep Space Network and confirmed its health
and status.
The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons is
gaining nearly 9,000 miles per hour from Jupiter's gravity
— half the speed of a space shuttle in orbit —
accelerating past 52,000 mph away from the sun. New
Horizons has covered approximately 500 million miles since
launch in January 2006, and it reached Jupiter more quickly
than the seven previous spacecraft to visit the solar
system's largest planet. On Wednesday, it raced through an
aim point just 500 miles across — the equivalent of a
skeet shooter in Washington hitting a target in Baltimore
on the first try.
New Horizons has been running through an intense
six-month systems check that will include more than 700
science observations of the Jupiter system by the end of
June. More than half of those observations took place last
week, including scans of Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere;
measurements of its magnetic cocoon (called the
magnetosphere); surveys of its delicate rings; maps of the
composition and topography of the large moons Io, Europa,
Ganymede and Callisto; and a detailed look at volcanic
activity on Io. While much of the close-in science data
will be sent back to Earth during the coming weeks, the
team downloaded a sampling of images to verify New
Horizons' performance.
The outbound leg of New Horizons' journey includes the
first-ever trip down the long "tail" of Jupiter's
magnetosphere, a wide stream of charged particles that
extends more than 100 million miles beyond the planet. And
telescopes on and above Earth — from amateur
astronomers' backyard telescopes, to the giant Keck
telescope in Hawaii, to the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra
X-Ray Observatory and others — are turning to Jupiter
as New Horizons flies by, ready to provide global context
to the close-up data New Horizons gathers.
"We designed the entire Jupiter encounter to be a
tough test for the mission team and our spacecraft, and
we're passing the test," said New Horizons principal
investigator Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research
Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We're not only learning what
we can expect from the spacecraft when we visit Pluto in
eight years; we're already getting some stunning science
results at Jupiter — and there's more to come."
New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New
Frontiers Program of medium-class spacecraft exploration
projects. APL manages the mission for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate and designed, built and operates the
spacecraft.
For the latest news and images, go to: pluto.jhuapl.edu or
www.nasa.gov/newhorizons.