Dec 29 2009
From The Space Library
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft crossed a milestone boundary, bringing it closer to Pluto than to Earth. New Horizons had launched in January 2006 on a mission to rendezvous with Pluto and to fly beyond Pluto, to study objects in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system. At 1,440 days into its 9.5-year journey, New Horizons’s schedule indicated that 1,928 days remained until the start of the craft’s operations. The craft would reach its closest point to Pluto in 2,022 days, during the summer of 2015. New Horizons was traveling primarily in sleep mode, but engineers had awakened the craft in November, to download several months of stored science data, correct a problem in the protection system software, and upload instructions for operating the spacecraft through early January 2010.
Alexis Madrigal, “Space Probe Gets Halfway to Pluto in Record Time,” Wired, 30 December 2009; Nancy Atkinson, “New Horizons Spacecraft Now Closer to Pluto Than Earth,” Universe Today, 30 December 2009.
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