WEBVTT

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Matthew from Big Lake: What factors influenced you to design the spacecraft like this and what materials is New Horizons made up of?

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Well, I thought that was, that was a very interesting question. First of all,

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the materials it's made of are pretty ordinary materials to make a spacecraft out of.

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There is, the structure is made out of aluminum and aluminum honeycomb panels.

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The large 6 1/2-foot dish antenna is made out of a carbon composite material.

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But the reason it looks the way it does is really because of the number of different requirements

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and factors that have to be taken into account when you design a spacecraft.

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First of all, we have the nuclear power source, which we like to maintain at some distance from

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the electronics because there is some radiation that comes off of it,

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and you want to minimize the exposure of the electronics and the instruments to that radiation environment.

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Secondly, the large high-gain antenna has to be pointed at Earth when we're spin-stabilized,

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so the spacecraft needs to be balanced and that kind of drives where you put certain components on the spacecraft.

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Probably the most important are the instruments, which have to be accommodated.

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They have to have the proper fields of view in order to see what they want to see on Pluto and Charon as we fly by.

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So that all has to be factored into it. And then they have to fit inside the launch vehicle fairing that you have.

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At the same time, you're trying to keep everything as simple as possible.

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So you put all that together and the design that you see is kind of what we came up with, which, incidentally,

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bears a strong resemblance to the Ulysses spacecraft, which also was a nuclear-power-source spacecraft.

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It was a cooperative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency.

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Its mission was to study the sun; it also has a large dish antenna like we do.

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But they were trying to solve the same sorts of problems we were and came up with pretty much the same solution.

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It sounds like you just gave our viewers a homework assignment. So you guys are going to have to go investigate the Ulysses spacecraft.

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There may be a quiz later.

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