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New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes Up To Prepare For Historic Flyby of Distant Object (space.com)
jwhyche writes: The New Horizons space probe has been in hibernation mode since Dec. 21. On June 5th, the spacecraft exited hibernation mode and began preparing for its next encounter. The spacecraft is currently 3.7 billion miles from Earth and will be spending the next few months preparing for its flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule (officially 2014 MU69). The craft is expected to pass by Ultima Thule during the New Year's holiday.
After the encounter with Ultima Thule on New Year's Day, the world changed forever.....
A link to to the actual New Horizons site should be informative as well.
Its spent 6 months in hibernation, and is woken up now to prepare for the fly past that is still more than 6 months away?
I would have told mission control to FO and wake me when we are a couple of weeks out..
I'm glad it doesn't take several months to wake my desktop computer. That would just be an endless nightmare!
And its twelve years old.
Yep, becoming a teenager.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Spent 5 months doing nothing - get a job you bum
To answer the inevitable question, "why wake it up now when the flyby is 6 months from now",
- the team needs time to check the spacecraft
- it needs to upload new software for the encounter, at speeds in the region of 1 kbit/s
- the spacecraft needs to do some observations to help in navigation. The targeted KBO is called 2014 MU69 because it was discovered in 2014, meaning we have very little data to derive its orbit from. Pre-flyby observations help finetune the flyby distance (has to be as close as possible to get good photos).
Over the next three days, the mission team will collect navigation tracking data (using signals from the Deep Space Network) and send the first of many commands to New Horizons' onboard computers to begin preparations for the Ultima flyby; lasting about two months, those flyby preparations include memory updates, Kuiper Belt science data retrieval, and a series of subsystem and science-instrument checkouts. In August, the team will command New Horizons to begin making distant observations of Ultima, images that will help the team refine the spacecraft's course to fly by the object.
One of the system requirements of the New Horizons telecommunication system is a minimum post-encounter end-of-playback data rate of 600 bps. From "The RF Telecommunications System for the New Horizons Mission to Pluto":
The "improvements" to which they refer would likely be in coding techniques developed after the New Horizons design was frozen (or after its last software update) or, less likely, improvements in the noise temperature or antenna gain of NASA's Deep Space Network receiving system.
So they expect to have a data rate of approximately 1 kbps, want at least 600 bps, and can use down to 6.3578 bps if absolutely necessary.
Maybe I should read more, but how long will new horizons continue to be able to respond to command and control from earth? And, what's being targeted next after this rock ?
2nd question, how far away is JPL or NASA to adding a small impulse engine to a satellite like this ? It'd presumably really be moving by now if there was just a little, but continuous nudge ...
Actually since Victorian mail was delivered up to 12 times a day, the throughput of sexting by mail was very practical.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
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