88
votes
Accepted
How was New Horizons able to direct data so precisely back to Earth?
The high gain antenna of New Horizon as an opening angle of its beam of about 0.6°. That means, it has to be pointed at Earth with an error margin of 0.3°.
As a practical example, this is more like ...
- 14.6k
38
votes
Accepted
Why no recent information about or photos of Ultima Thule?
New Horizons was hidden behind the Sun a few days after the flyby, from January 4th to January 7th.
Almost as soon as the encounter and earliest downlinks are over, New Horizons will go into solar ...
- 125k
37
votes
Could one of the interstellar probes discover Planet IX by accident?
Any hypothetical planet (or other object) even further out would be very dark, so few photos are taken for any reason other than to look inward. (And in any case, the cameras on the Voyagers are shut ...
- 21k
31
votes
Where will the Pioneer, Voyager and New Horizons spacecraft be after one galactic orbit?
Oversimplifying by taking the current velocity of each probe and multiplying it by 250 million years, I get:
Voyager 1 - 10,000 light years away
Voyager 2 - 9,600 light years away
New Horizons - 9,...
- 1,802
27
votes
Why no recent information about or photos of Ultima Thule?
In addition to the limited downlink time due to it being hidden behind the Sun, it should be noted that the New Horizons team is prioritizing downlinking the metadata of each of the images. This will ...
- 121k
26
votes
Accepted
Why have there been no new New Horizons images in the last few weeks?
Organic Marble is correct in the comment, New Horizons is now busy with Departure Phase (DP2 from Aug 5-Oct 22) science and transmitting plasma and dust data, and no additional images will be ...
- 76.4k
24
votes
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How much longer would New Horizons take to reach Pluto without the Jupiter slingshot?
It was said in here that the time to reach Pluto was shortened by 3 years. It's also said that after the Jupiter flyby the probe gained ~ 4 km/s accelerating to the speed of 23 km/s relative to the ...
- 1,694
24
votes
Could one of the interstellar probes discover Planet IX by accident?
There are five probes leaving the Solar System. Pioneer 10 and 11 are no longer functioning. Voyager 1 and 2 are functioning but their cameras have not been used since the early 1990s, and it is ...
- 7,726
23
votes
How come there are so few TNOs the Voyager probes and New Horizons can visit?
It's a small matter of propulsion, or rather a matter of small propulsion.
Pluto orbits just over 5 billion kilometers from the sun, if you look at the volume of the space between 5 billion km and 8 ...
- 19.9k
21
votes
Where will the Pioneer, Voyager and New Horizons spacecraft be after one galactic orbit?
We don't know as there's no way to calculate it exactly. To do so we'd have to have extremely accurate data on every gravitational interaction these space probes will ever be exposed to. This would ...
- 19.9k
20
votes
Accepted
Why do New Horizons and Dawn have such different imagers/cameras aboard?
New Horizons was designed to do a fly-by of Pluto in a relatively large distance. It was only in range of Pluto for a couple of hours. Dawn is designed to orbit Ceres at much closer range. To ...
- 584
20
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How tall are Pluto's mountains? Are they the tallest ice features in the Solar System?
How tall are these things?
Are they made of ice?
Are they the tallest things on Pluto?
Are these the tallest ice features in the Solar System?
"New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s ...
- 1,270
20
votes
Accepted
Could New Horizons take a "Pale Blue Dot"-like image this year?
From the Johns Hopkins University page:
It is possible that another flyby target can be found and reached with
New Horizons' remaining fuel supply. And after that? Another exciting
possibility ...
- 48.7k
18
votes
Accepted
Why did New Horizons have to be spin-balanced to grams-level precision? (With quarters!)
I am familiar with the spin dynamics of both New Horizons and Ladee, since I performed nutation fuel slosh tests on models of the spacecraft in my drop tower facility, Applied Dynamics Laboratories, ...
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16
votes
What time will news from New Horizons' Arrokoth (2014 MU69) encounter become available to the public?
In simple explanation, we won't able to know what's up with New Horizons right away. The probe will be busy collecting all the science data during the high-speed flyby.
Closest approach will be at ...
- 1,537
16
votes
Could one of the interstellar probes discover Planet IX by accident?
Planet Nine semi-major axis is estimated to be 400 AU to 800 AU. New Horizons is now about 50 AU away from the Sun and travels about 3 AU per year. So in about 120 years New Horizons will be 400 AU ...
- 48.7k
16
votes
Could one of the interstellar probes discover Planet IX by accident?
It is actually pretty likely we have seen Planet 9, but just don't know that it is in fact moving. The problem is to know something is an object in the solar system, we have to see it move, and an ...
- 121k
15
votes
Accepted
Did New Horizons capture enough of Pluto's surface to create its global map?
If you mean if New Horizons' data return could produce a global high-resolution map of Pluto's surface, then no, and here's why:
Pluto at New Horizons approach:
New Horizons Ground Track on Pluto:
...
- 76.4k
15
votes
Accepted
Are there any accurate velocity plots of all spacecraft that achieved escape velocity from the solar system? (Pioneers, Voyagers, & New Horizons)
Wikimedia has the following graph for the heliocentric velocities of both Pioneer probes:
(SVG)
As far as I can tell it's accurate, since it clearly shows the velocity change of Pioneer 10 during its ...
14
votes
Accepted
Did the Pluto flyby give New Horizons any significant gravitational boost?
I've been trying to figure out where I read about this, and then realized that I didn't read it. I saw it in a video.
The NASA New Horizons channel on Youtube made some short videos called "Pluto in ...
- 7,144
14
votes
How much longer would New Horizons take to reach Pluto without the Jupiter slingshot?
Depending on the time of launch, there were 4 different major plans for the NH mission profile. The first 3 involved Jupiter flybys, and would have an arrival date of 2015, 2016, or 2017. The last was ...
- 121k
13
votes
Accepted
How close to 2014 MU₆₉ can New Horizons get?
The flyby distance will depend on how accurately they can measure 2014 MU69's orbit. This KBO was discovered only 3 years ago, and because it's so faint we only have a few observations to go on.
For ...
- 125k
12
votes
Did New Horizons also demonstrate the "Pioneer Anomaly"?
I found this reference in a 2015 Reddit interview of the New Horizons team:
Has the team had any success looking for Pioneer Anomaly type effects in New Horizon's position and trajectory data? Thanks ...
- 125k
10
votes
Accepted
What caused New Horizon's so-called "40-year glitch"?
I found a bit more detail by googling for "New Horizons Anomaly Review Board Report". The best writeup was from here.
By 4 p.m., the mission's Anomaly Review Board had convened to be
briefed on ...
- 177k
10
votes
Accepted
What's after the Kuiper Belt for New Horizons?
RTG power will drop below the level needed to run the transmitter sometime in the 2030s.
We can still communicate with the Voyagers, which are 3 times further away than New Horizons. NH is more ...
- 125k
10
votes
Accepted
Why is New Horizons' data transmission speed so slow compared to Voyager?
The phrase "limited by ability to capture 1.4 kbit/s data using a 70 m/34 m antenna array" indicates they used 2 large dishes to receive Voyager's signal, which takes up a lot of DSN resources (only a ...
- 125k
10
votes
How come there are so few TNOs the Voyager probes and New Horizons can visit?
Try to imagine a planetary walk. All distances and diameters are scaled down by a factor of 1E-9 or 1 to 1 billion. On such a walk the Sun is a sphere of 1.4 m diameter.
From Sun to Earth you have to ...
- 48.7k
9
votes
What drives the choice of onboard memory size for the New Horizons probe?
Two reasons why the memory is so small:
New Horizons was designed around the year 2000. Solid-state memory sizes were much smaller back then: looking at the Internet Archive, the typical ...
- 14.1k
7
votes
Why do New Horizons and Dawn have such different imagers/cameras aboard?
SWaP and SWaP-C - Size, Weight, and Power (and Cost) can almost always explain decisions beyond the mission objectives. Reducing any one of these for one instrument means they are available resources ...
- 1,093
7
votes
Accepted
Why is part of this New Horizon's Charon high resolution image missing?
In fact, the New Horizons team is now admitting that they missed the Pluto image, and likely Charon as well. Here's a few quotes from the Washington Post.
If you look at the first big close-up ...
- 121k
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