New Horizons: NASA’s Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission

the first in situ reconnaissance of Pluto and the Kuiper belt. The NH spacecraft was launched on 2006 January 19, received a gravity assist from Jupiter during closest approach on 2007 February 28, and is currently heading for a flyby encounter with the Pluto system. NH will study the Pluto system for nearly 7 months beginning in early 2015, with closest approach currently planned for mid-July 2015 at an altitude of ∼10,000 km above Pluto’s surface. If NASA approves an extended mission phase, the NH spacecraft will be targeted toward a flyby encounter with one or more small (∼50 km diameter) Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) after the Pluto flyby. The NH spacecraft has a total dry mass of only 400 kg and was launched with 76.8 kg of hydrazine propellant to provide in-flight trajectory correction and spacecraft attitude control. The launch performance was virtually flawless, so less fuel was used for trajectory correction than originally budgeted, which means that more fuel should be available for targeting KBOs beyond the Pluto system. NH carries a sophisticated suite of seven scientific instruments, altogether weighing less than 30 kg and drawing less than 30 W of power, that includes panchromatic and color imagers, ultraviolet and infrared spectral imagers, a radio science package, plasma and charged particle sensors, and a dust countin