In this presentation, I have discussed some facts and important features of New Horizons - the probe who flew past Pluto this year! It is one the greatest achievement in the history of Astronomy! It gave a great insight on Pluto. For the first time we saw how does it look like and then we all said, "Planet with a heart". Hope you will like it! Enjoy!

1. NEW HORIZONS
 It is an interplanetary space probe that was
launched as NASA’s New Frontier progam to
study Pluto, it’s moon and Kuiper Belt
objects.
 Launch Date: January 19, 2006 19:00 UTC
 Launched directly into an Earth-and-solar-
escape trajectory with an Earth-relative
speed of about 16.26 km/s.
 #PlutoFlyby: July 14, 2015 11:49:57 UTC
 It flew by Pluto at a distance of 12,600 km from it’s surface.
 Hours later, at 00:52:37 UTC NASA received the first communication
from the probe following flyby at the time expected.
New Horizon

2. BEING AN ENGINEER, ATLEAST WE
MUST KNOW WHAT ARE THE
SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS PRESENT IN
NEW HORIZONS.
IT’S BETTER NOT TO GO INTO DETAILS
OF COURSE!

3. Hey wait! It takes a LONG time to reach the data from
probe to us!

4. TALKING TO PLUTO IS HARD!
 Pluto is about 30 times AU from Sun. So it’s radio signal is weak.
 New Horizons can transmit at most 1 kilobit/s. Even at these low
data rates, only the Deep Space Network's (DSN) very largest, 70-
meter dishes can detect New Horizons' faint signal.
 LORRI's detector is 1024 pixels square and digitizes each pixel as a
12-bit number.
 So 12 million is an awful lot of bits, but fortunately LORRI's images
are amenable to lossless compressions ;they can be zipped up to
about 2.5 Megabits without any loss of detail.
1. 2.5 Megabits, at 1 kilobit/s.
2. It takes 42 minutes for 1 LORRI photo to reach Earth.
3. Most communications sessions last about 8 hours. That's 11
images per communication session.

5.  And while New Horizons is pointing its dish at Earth, it can't point at
anything else, including Pluto. It has to choose between communicating
and taking data.
 When it is taking data, it's building up a data backlog, which it fails to
transmit completely in its next communications session.

6.  New Horizons' radio system includes 2 Travelling Wave Tube Amplifiers
or TWTAs. The TWTAs amplify the radio signals before they get broadcast
from New Horizons' 2.1-meter dish.
 One of them transmits radio signals with left-hand circular polarization,
and one of them transmits with right-hand circular polarization.
 On Earth, special hardware at the DSN can separately receive the 2
differently-polarized signals, and then combine them to make the signal
stronger i.e. about 1.9 times the rate compared with a single TWTA.
 High-gain antenna  Cassegrain reflector layout
 Half-Power Beam Width of about a degree.
The answer is...

7.  Data storage is done on two low-power solid-state recorders (one
primary, one backup) holding up to 8 GB each.
 Probe will require approximately 16 months after it has left the vicinity
of Pluto to transmit the data load back to Earth.
 New Horizons' nuclear power source decayed and there is no longer
enough power to run both TWTAs at the same time.
 Amazingly, they can shut down their guidance and control system and
use the saved power to run the second transmitter. But how can you point
the antenna stably at Earth with your guidance system shut down?

8.  Spin the probe keeping its orientation fixed. Spinning spacecraft have
incredibly stable pointing.
 So, it's worth to spend a little hydrazine and quit taking pictures a
couple of times in order to get all the approach data down to Earth before
the near-encounter phase starts.
 That’s why, it spent 2 long spin period after fine-tuning New Horizons’
path towards Pluto, without taking any image data.
 1st spin period: March 10 to April 4
 2nd spin period: May 15 to May 27
 New Horizons completely emptied its memory on both occasions,
making room for more and better data. And while the spacecraft is
spinning, its instruments SWAP, PEPSSI and SDC can all still take data.

9.  So, already mentioned, it'll still take more than a year to get all the
data from the encounter back to Earth. A lot of data indeed!
 Further more, it won't be able to use the 2-TWTA communication
mode.
 So, the Kuiper belt object flyby will almost certainly require data return
through only 1 transmitter.
NEW HORIZONS IS A LESSON IN
PATIENCE!

11. BUT NOT ANYMORE!

12. SOME FACTS..

13. THANK YOU