The New Horizons Spacecraft

Abstract

(where the solar irradiance is 1/1000 of the level near the Earth) require a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to supply electrical power. One RTG was available for use by New Horizons. To accommodate this constraint, the spacecraft electronics were designed to operate on less than 200 W. The travel time to Pluto put additional demands on system reliability.Only after a flight time of approximately 10 years would the desired data be collected and returned to Earth. This represents the longest flight duration prior to the return of primary science data for any mission by NASA. The spacecraft system architecture provides sufficient redundancy to meet this requirement with a probability of mission success of greater than 0.85. The spacecraft is now on its way to Pluto, with an arrival date of 14 July 2015. Initial inflight tests have verified that the spacecraft will meet the design requirements.

The Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) on the New Horizons Mission

“…To this end, data packets sent from PEPSSI to the command and data handling (C&DH) system are time tagged with MET time to 1-second resolution (Fountain et al 2008). Based on spacecraft time-keeping requirements, knowledge of MET time relative to UTC time to ∼10 ms accuracy is known after the fact.…”

“…The first port connects to the spacecraft C&DH system located in the integrated electronics module (IEM) #1, and the second port connects to the spacecraft C&DH system located in IEM #2. Normally, only one of the two IEMs is active, and PEPSSI responds to and interacts with the active IEM (Fountain et al 2008). The serial ports are bi-directional and PEPSSI is capable of simultaneously sending and receiving at 38.4 k baud rate with 8 data bits, no parity, 1 start bit, and 1 stop bit.…”

“…The Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) is one of seven scientific instruments/experiments (Weaver et al 2008) on board the New Horizons spacecraft (Fountain et al 2008), now on its way to Pluto (Stern 2008). While it is doubtful that Pluto has an intrinsic magnetic field and magnetosphere that accelerates charged particles to high energies, Pluto does have (or has had in the very recent past) a substantial atmosphere (Elliot et al 1989(Elliot et al , 2003(Elliot et al , 2007Brosch 1995;Sicardy et al 2003;Fink et al 1980) that is escaping into the solar wind in a comet-like interaction (Bagenal and McNutt 1989;Kecskemety and Cravens 1993;Bagenal et al 1997;Trafton et al 1997;Krasnopolsky 1999;Delamere and Bagenal 2004;Tian and Toon 2005).…”

Spark plasma sintered bismuth telluride-based thermoelectric materials incorporating dispersed boron carbide

“…Thermoelectric devices have been applied to numerous energy conversion applications, some of the most demanding being in Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) systems for deep space and planetary exploration missions [1][2][3]. To-date, these power systems use the heat generated from the nuclear decay of plutonium-238, which is then converted into electricity by lead telluride or silicon-germanium thermoelectric materials.…”

Uranus Pathfinder: exploring the origins and evolution of Ice Giant planets

“…The nominal UP mission involves a launch on a Soyuz-Fregat launch vehicle in 2021 with a ≈15-year cruise before entering into a highly elliptical science orbit around Uranus. To reduce cruise phase costs UP would be placed into a quasihibernation mode, similar to Rosetta [26] and New Horizons [21], and would make solar wind measurements en route to Uranus. UP would periodically come out of hibernation to downlink solar wind science data and spacecraft telemetry to Earth.…”