Matthew from Big Lake: What factors influenced you to design the spacecraft like this and what materials is New Horizons made up of?
Well, I thought that was, that was a very interesting question. First of all,
the materials it's made of are pretty ordinary materials to make a spacecraft out of.
There is, the structure is made out of aluminum and aluminum honeycomb panels.
The large 6 1/2-foot dish antenna is made out of a carbon composite material.
But the reason it looks the way it does is really because of the number of different requirements
and factors that have to be taken into account when you design a spacecraft.
First of all, we have the nuclear power source, which we like to maintain at some distance from
the electronics because there is some radiation that comes off of it,
and you want to minimize the exposure of the electronics and the instruments to that radiation environment.
Secondly, the large high-gain antenna has to be pointed at Earth when we're spin-stabilized,
so the spacecraft needs to be balanced and that kind of drives where you put certain components on the spacecraft.
Probably the most important are the instruments, which have to be accommodated.
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.
So that all has to be factored into it. And then they have to fit inside the launch vehicle fairing that you have.
At the same time, you're trying to keep everything as simple as possible.
So you put all that together and the design that you see is kind of what we came up with, which, incidentally,
bears a strong resemblance to the Ulysses spacecraft, which also was a nuclear-power-source spacecraft.
It was a cooperative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency.
Its mission was to study the sun; it also has a large dish antenna like we do.
But they were trying to solve the same sorts of problems we were and came up with pretty much the same solution.
It sounds like you just gave our viewers a homework assignment. So you guys are going to have to go investigate the Ulysses spacecraft.
There may be a quiz later.