New Horizons will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a powerful Atlas V rocket.
Omar Baez, NASA launch manager for this mission, joins us now. Thanks for being here, Omar.
Thank you, Tiffany. It's a pleasure being here.
The Launch Services Program has been working on this mission now for several years. Would you share with us how things are looking as we get closer to
launch? Sure. Tiffany, things are looking great for launch this upcoming Tuesday. We just finished our launch readiness review and we're -- we've cleared
all items that we were working on in this vehicle and we're really set for flight this Tuesday.
This is the Antonov airplane that the first stage on the Atlas V is delivered to us from,
and it comes in from Denver, which is where the tank is fabricated.
We'll see it roll out here in a little bit. Just to give you a couple of gee whizzes on that,
that first stage produces eight hundred and sixty thousand pounds of thrust for the Atlas, and it runs on RP1, which is kerosene and liquid oxygen,
which is the liquified form of the oxygen we breathe. Those are the combustibles used that produce the flame coming out the back of that rocket there.
This is the Centaur, which is the second stage. The second stage is powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, again,
the liquified form of oxygen and the liquified form of hydrogen. They're both cryogenic, which means they're really cold.
And this produces twenty-three thousand pounds of thrust at vacuum, which is in space, produces this amount of thrust.
And what we're doing here is we're mating it to the first stage on the Atlas V and what will happen here is you'll see the
-- these are the additional solid rocket motors that we're using on the five fifty-one, which is the series of Atlas V we're flying,
and what that means -- it's an Atlas V flying five solid rocket motors. These rocket motors produce anywhere from two hundred and
fifty thousand pounds of thrust to about three hundred thousand pounds of thrust, depending on the altitude.
And we use five of them, and the total thrust on this mission from that first stage is going to be about two and a half million pounds of thrust.
What you're seeing there, the smoke billowing out is actually vapor, and that was our wet dress rehearsal which happened December 15th.
And what you're seeing now is actually the spacecraft encapsulated within that clam shell or the fairing and that's going to be
lifted up onto the Atlas V on top of the Centaur, we're going to lay that down on top of there, and that completes what we
call the stack or the completed rocket. But within that there is the spacecraft there is actually carrying a third stage,
which is the Boeing Star forty-eight motor solid rocket motor which also provides additional thrust to get us to Pluto.
Our NASA Direct viewers have submitted some great questions for you. Can you answer a few of them?
Sure.
Great. Our first question comes from David from Fayetteville. What is the window?
David, the window -- and I should define this in two ways: There is people that call it window or the launch period.
A window is a specific time that I can launch this mission in a time of day. This particular mission, Pluto, has a two-hour window every day.
And then we have a period. The period is between now, the 17th, and it ends on the 14th of February. We can't launch after that until the
following year. That time period is the time when the Earth aligns itself for the least tortuous path towards Pluto, and that's the time
-- the two-hours time that we have is the limitation on having fuel onboard for X number of time and the ability of the
vehicle to change its asthmuth and still hit a certain point in space to be able to escape the Earth's trajectory.
So, basically, we have to launch by Valentine's Day?
Yes, that is -- we don't have to. We could wait until next year if things don't go right for any particular reason;
Our last question comes from Junichi from Japan. What is the advantage of using an Atlas V to launch New Horizons instead of a
Boeing Delta II? Is it because an Atlas V is more powerful?
Absolutely, Junichi. Just to give you an example, the Atlas V is almost two hundred feet in length. The Delta II is somewhere around
a hundred and forty feet in length. So what's the difference? It's a heck of a lot more fuel in the Atlas V and more powerful engines.
That equates to thrust. I could go into the what's called the rocket equation and tell you that that's -- that the Atlas V is more powerful,
but just the size of the rocket -- and we have to consume all our fuel all in one shot.
We don't get to stop for a gas stop anywhere and fuel up, so with that additional sixty feet of rocket that we have, it's more fuel,
bigger engines, more thrust. We're talking about two and a half million pounds of thrust versus just over a million pounds of thrust on the Delta II.
Thanks for being with us on NASA Direct, Omar, and best of luck for a successful launch.
Thank you very much, Tiffany. It's a pleasure.