New Horizons Spacecraft

The spacecraft was built primarily by Southwest Research Institute and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL_. The mission's principal investigator is Dr. S. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute. APL manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission team also includes Ball Aerospace Corporation, the Boeing Company, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford University, KinetX Inc. (navigation team), Lockheed Martin Corporation, University of Colorado, the U.S. Department of Energy, and a number of other firms, NASA centers, and university partners.

The New Horizons mission uses a plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generator for power in deep space, where sunlight isn’t intense enough to run the spacecraft. It’s like the generators that flew in the Cassini probe now at Saturn. In fact, it’s Cassini’s spare.

Already the fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons reached Planet Jupiter just 13 months after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida in January 2006. The flyby added 9,000 miles per hour, pushing New Horizons past 50,000 miles per hour and setting up a flight by Pluto in July 2015. New Horizons spacecraft provided new data on the Jupiter system, stunning scientists with never-before-seen perspectives of the giant planet's atmosphere, rings, moons and magnetosphere. Images include the first close-up scans of the Little Red Spot, Jupiter's second-largest storm, which formed when three smaller storms merged during the past decade. The storm, about half the size of Jupiter's larger Great Red Spot and about 70 percent of Earth's diameter, began turning red about a year before New Horizons flew past it.

New Horizons came to within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on February 28 2007 using the planet’s gravity to trim three years off its travel time to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach, the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that information back to Earth.