Fergie's Tech Blog

New Horizons: Pluto Payload Ready For Flight

Artist's rendering of New Horizons
probe at Pluto/Charon.
Image source: NASA

The science payload for NASA's New Horizons mission completed its last major preparations for flight last week. The probe will be the first to visit Pluto and its moon, Charon.

The compact New Horizons spacecraft carries a payload of seven science instruments for examining the geology, composition, surface, temperature and atmospheric structure of the planet and its moon.

Flybys of one or more of the icy objects in the Kuiper Belt may be scheduled thereafter, during a mission extension.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) led the development of the science payload, which recently completed a series of spacecraft environmental tests in Maryland at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), where the instruments were also integrated with the spacecraft.

posted by Fergie @ 10/19/2005 10:47:00 AM