Feb. 28, 2007

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington 
202-358-1726

Michael Buckley
Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
240-228-7536 

RELEASE: 07-55

NASA SPACECRAFT GETS BOOST FROM JUPITER FOR PLUTO ENCOUNTER

LAUREL, Md. - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed a 
flyby of Jupiter early this morning, using the massive planet's 
gravity to pick up speed for its 3-billion mile voyage to Pluto and 
the unexplored Kuiper Belt region beyond. 

"We're on our way to Pluto," said New Horizons Mission Operations 
Manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics 
Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. "The swingby was a success; the 
spacecraft is on course and performed just as we expected."

New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter at 12:43 a.m. 
EST, placing the spacecraft on target to reach the Pluto system in 
July 2015. During closest approach, the spacecraft could not 
communicate with Earth, but gathered science data on the giant 
planet, its moons and atmosphere. 

At 11:55 a.m. EST mission operators at APL established contact through 
NASA's Deep Space Network and confirmed New Horizons' health and 
status. 

The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons is gaining nearly 
9,000 mph from Jupiter's gravity - accelerating to more than 52,000 
mph. The spacecraft has covered approximately 500 million miles since 
its launch in January 2006 and reached Jupiter faster than seven 
previous spacecraft to visit the solar system's largest planet. New 
Horizons raced through a target just 500 miles across, the equivalent 
of a skeet shooter in Washington hitting a target in Baltimore on the 
first try. 

New Horizons has been running through an intense six-month long 
systems check that will include more than 700 science observations of 
the Jupiter system by the end of June. More than half of those 
observations are taking place this week, including scans of Jupiter's 
turbulent atmosphere, measurements of its magnetic cocoon, surveys of 
its delicate rings, maps of the composition and topography of the 
large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and a detailed look at 
volcanic activity on Io. 

"We designed the entire Jupiter encounter to be a tough test for the 
mission team and our spacecraft, and we're passing the test," says 
New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern from the Southwest 
Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We're not only learning what we 
can expect from the spacecraft when we visit Pluto in eight years, 
we’re already getting some stunning science results at Jupiter - and 
there's more to come."

While much of the close-in science data will be sent back to Earth 
during the coming weeks, the team also downloaded a sampling of 
images to verify New Horizons' performance.

The outbound leg of New Horizons' journey includes the first-ever trip 
down the long "tail" of Jupiter's magnetosphere, a wide stream of 
charged particles that extends more than 100 million miles beyond the 
planet. Amateur backyard telescopes, the giant Keck telescope in 
Hawaii, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory 
and other ground and space-based telescopes are turning to Jupiter as 
New Horizons flies by, ready to provide global context to the 
close-up data New Horizons gathers.

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program of 
medium-class spacecraft exploration projects. The Applied Physics 
Laboratory, Laurel, Md., manages the mission for NASA's Science 
Mission Directorate, Washington. The mission team also includes 
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; NASA's Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the U.S. Department of 
Energy, Washington; Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.; and 
several corporations and university partners.

For the latest news and images from the New Horizons mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons 

	
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