Moving on, we've heard some interesting background about the mission. Now we're pleased to introduce the first of two special guests with us
today from John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboritory, David Kusnierkiewicz. David is a mission systems engineer for New Horizons.
Welcome to our broadcast, David.
Hi, Tiffany.
Why don't you pronounce for the audience your last name.
Okay, it's Kutch-ner-ka-vich. Don't try that at home, you could break your teeth.
David, would you please tell us a little about your role in developing the New Horizons spacecraft
and what challenges you might have had to overcome while preparing it for launch?
Sure. I'm the mission systems engineer for the mission. In that role, I'm really responsible for all the technical aspects of the program,
the spacecraft, the ground systems, integration of the test campaign, and mission operations.
Of course, there is a very large team of people that really help make all this possible.
As far as some of the challenges we've had since we've been down here, I'm really happy to say that it's really been pretty routine.
I think the biggest challenge we had probably was Hurricane Wilma, when that came through. It forced us to stand down for a number of days.
We had to put the spacecraft back into its shipping container to protect it in case of any damage from the storm.
And after that, we resumed normal operations. We had enough slack in our schedule to accommodate that, and it's been pretty routine.
As you know, the NASA Direct question board has received many questions from interested people all over the world.
Are you ready to answer some of them right now?
Love to.
Our first question comes from Peter from Switzerland.
Could you tell me the speed of New Horizons before and after the Jupiter fly-by?
Yes. Before the Jupiter fly-by, the spacecraft is moving at about 43,000 miles per hour with respect to the sun.
Jupiter increases our speed by about 20 percent to 52,000 miles per hour.
Our next question comes from Dmitry from Melbourne.
Voyager has Intel 4004 processors onboard. What kind of CPUs are onboard of New Horizons?
Well, the processors on New Horizons are pretty specialized processors for space applications. They're made to withstand the radiation
environment of space, so they have been qualified for space flight and have all been flown before.
They're not processors you've really ever heard of before, and they're not as powerful as the processors you have in your computers today at home,
but they're the right processors to get the job done.