NASA News: The New Horizons Spacecraft Just Hit A Flyby Milestone

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA News: The New Horizons Spacecraft Just Hit A Flyby Milestone
International Business Times
Nina Godlewski  April 3, 2017






The New Horizons spacecraft sent to study Pluto and Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 (and eventually beyond) just reached the halfway point between the two, according to  NASA.

The  craft launched in January 2006 and is currently 3.5 billion miles from Earth, a long way from home and it takes five hours and 20 minutes for correspondence traveling to the craft from Earth to reach it, or vice versa. In  2007 on its way out to Pluto it stopped by neighboring Jupiter to get a boost from the gravitational pull from the largest planet in our solar system.

Eight years later, in the summer of 2015, it arrived at Pluto, and spent six months traveling around the dwarf planet sending back data on the moons and the dwarf. New Horizons then went off towards 2014 MU69. It reached the halfway point of 486.19 million miles past Pluto but still away from 2014 MU69, at 8 p.m. EDT on April 2.

This halfway point in distance is different from the halfway point in time though, because the craft is slightly slowing as it gets further from the Sun, the time and distance points are different. It will reach the halfway point in time come April 7.

New Horizons should reach MU69 at 2 a.m. EDT on New Year’s Day, 2019.  Before then though, the craft will have a nice long hibernation period of 157 days starting a few hours before that April 7 flyby time.

“In addition to MU69, we plan to study more than two-dozen other KBOs in the distance and measure the charged particle and dust environment all the way across the Kuiper Belt,” said Hal Weaver a New Horizons project scientist, according to NASA.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-news-horizons-spacecraft-just-201209714.html