New Horizons will travel about three billion miles to reach its destination. The spacecraft, about the size of a grand piano,
carries a payload of seven sophisticated instruments. Glen Fountain, the mission project manager from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory, gives us a closer look at this amazing spacecraft poised to embark on an historic journey.
Horizons will be launched on an Atlas V, one of the biggest launch vehicles we have; and one of the
reasons for that is we have to go so far and to get there we have to go fast.
If you look at the launch vehicle with respect to the spacecraft, the spacecraft looks like a hood ornament on a big car,
so here is this huge rocket and this little tiny spacecraft on top of it. And when we launch, it will be the fastest object ever to
leave the Earth that man has sent out. The spacecraft size is about the size of a grand piano, a very grand piano,
and you can think of this grand piano with a antenna, dish antenna, sitting on the top of it, the antenna being about as
wide as I am tall, six or seven feet. It's actually two meters. And the spacecraft weighs about a thousand pounds.
It takes nine-and-a-half years to even get to where we want to take the measurements, so we need a highly reliable system.
So we have built into the electronics nearly two of everything. We are redundant. We have two guidance control processors, computers.
We have two command and data handling processors. We have two solid state recorders. We have two of almost all the other systems that
we need to guarantee that the electronics will operate even if there is a failure, we can switch from one to the other.
Well, there are seven instruments on the spacecraft. They will be taking images. We have, basically, three instruments that will take
images of the planet in various colors, and we have spectrums, so we will be able to break up these images into very, very tiny segments
of the color spectrum, from the ultraviolent, through the visible, and into the infrared. And with those various colors in the spectrum,
we'll be able to determine what is the chemical makeup on the surface of the planet, some of the constituents of the
atmosphere which we know Pluto has. The highest-resolution instrument is called LORRI, for Long Range Reconnaissance Instrument.
It will allow us at closest approach to Pluto to be able to take images, with the size of the pixel to be 50 meters.
And then we have a couple of other instruments. One that will go with one of the ultraviolet imaging systems to understand the atmospheric constituency.
And then two other instruments to understand the interaction of Pluto and its moon, Charon, with the solar wind.
As you may know, the sun creates a lot of plasma that it ejects out into the solar system. And this plasma interacts with the Earth,
and we sometimes have magnetic storms on the Earth with the interaction of the magnetic sphere of the Earth with that solar wind,
and that goes on out into the solar system. So we want to understand the interaction of the solar wind with Pluto to understand
some other things about the interaction of that atmosphere with that solar wind. With two instruments that are plasma instruments,
one called PEPSSI and the other one called SWAP, for Solar Wind At Pluto. Then the last instrument is called the Student Dust Counter.
It was actually built by a group of college students from the University of Colorado. And, it's going to measure the dust in the solar system as
we go from the Earth to Pluto and beyond. One of the exciting aspects that this mission allows us to do is, again, it's in
this grand way of which people in the United States have thought about their role in exploring, we have gone to all but one of
the classic nine planets in our solar system that the United States has been the first to be there.
So we're completing that list of discoveries of the solar system with this mission, and it's exciting to be part of that.
It's exciting to be able to talk to people about this continued sense of exploration that this mission is continuing for the United States.
Thank you, Glen. You've helped us understand more about the complexities of this mission.