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The New Horizons mission was launched on 2006 January 19, and the spacecraft is heading for a flyby encounter with the Pluto system in the summer of 2015. The challenges associated with sending a spacecraft to Pluto in less than 10 years and performing an ambitious suite of scientific investigations at such large heliocentric distances (> 32 AU) are formidable and required the development of lightweight, low power, and highly sensitive instruments. This paper provides an overview of the New Horizons science payload, which is comprised of seven instruments. Alice provides spatially resolved ultraviolet spectroscopy. The Ralph instrument has two components: the Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), which performs panchromatic and color imaging, and the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA), which provides near-infrared spectroscopic mapping capabilities. The Radio Experiment (REX) is a component of the New Horizons telecommunications system that provides both occultation and radiometry capabilities. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) provides high sensitivity, high spatial resolution optical imaging capabilities. The Solar Wind at Pluto (SWAP) instrument measures the density and speed of solar wind particles. The Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) measures energetic protons and CNO ions. The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VB-SDC) is used to record dust particle impacts during the cruise phases of the mission.
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NASAs New Horizons (NH) Pluto-Kuiper belt (PKB) mission was launched on 19 January 2006 on a Jupiter Gravity Assist (JGA) trajectory toward the Pluto system for a 14 July 2015 closest approach; Jupiter closest approach occurred on 28 February 2007. It was competitively selected by NASA for development on 29 November 2001. New Horizons is the first mission to the Pluto system and the Kuiper belt; and will complete the reconnaissance of the classical planets. The ~400 kg spacecraft carries seven scientific instruments, including imagers, spectrometers, radio science, a plasma and particles suite, and a dust counter built by university students. NH will study the Pluto system over a 5-month period beginning in early 2015. Following Pluto, NH will go on to reconnoiter one or two 30-50 kilometer diameter Kuiper belt Objects (KBOs), if NASA approves an extended mission. If successful, NH will represent a watershed development in the scientific exploration of a new class of bodies in the solar system - dwarf planets, of worlds with exotic volatiles on their surfaces, of rapidly (possibly hydrodynamically) escaping atmospheres, and of giant impact derived satellite systems. It will also provide the first dust density measurements beyond 18 AU, cratering records that shed light on both the ancient and present-day KB impactor population down to tens of meters, and a key comparator to the puzzlingly active, former dwarf planet (now satellite of Neptune) called Triton, which is as large as Eris and Pluto.
The Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) comprises the hardware and accompanying science investigation on the New Horizons spacecraft to measure pick-up ions from Plutos outgassing atmosphere. To the extent that Pluto retains its characteristics similar to those of a heavy comet as detected in stellar occultations since the early 1980s, these measurements will characterize the neutral atmosphere of Pluto while providing a consistency check on the atmospheric escape rate at the encounter epoch with that deduced from the atmospheric structure at lower altitudes by the ALICE, REX, and SWAP experiments on New Horizons. In addition, PEPSSI will characterize any extended ionosphere and solar wind interaction while also characterizing the energetic particle environment of Pluto, Charon, and their associated system. First proposed for development for the Pluto Express mission in September 1993, what became the PEPSSI instrument went through a number of development stages to meet the requirements of such an instrument for a mission to Pluto while minimizing the required spacecraft resources. The PEPSSI instrument provides for measurements of ions (with compositional information) and electrons from 10s of keV to ~1 MeV in a 120 deg x 12 deg fan-shaped beam in six sectors for 1.5 kg and ~2.5 W.
The New Horizons spacecraft was launched on 19 January 2006. The spacecraft was designed to provide a platform for seven instruments that will collect and return data from Pluto in 2015. The design drew on heritage from previous missions developed at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and other missions such as Ulysses. The trajectory design imposed constraints on mass and structural strength to meet the high launch acceleration needed to reach the Pluto system prior to the year 2020. The spacecraft subsystems were designed to meet tight mass and power allocations, yet provide the necessary control and data handling finesse to support data collection and return when the one-way light time during the Pluto flyby is 4.5 hours. Missions to the outer solar system require a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to supply electrical power, and a single RTG is used by New Horizons. To accommodate this constraint, the spacecraft electronics were designed to operate on less than 200 W. The spacecraft system architecture provides sufficient redundancy to provide a probability of mission success of greater than 0.85, even with a mission duration of over 10 years. The spacecraft is now on its way to Pluto, with an arrival date of 14 July 2015. Initial inflight tests have verified that the spacecraft will meet the design requirements.
KAGRA is a newly build gravitational-wave observatory, a laser interferometer with 3 km arm length, located in Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. In this paper in the series of KAGRA-featured articles, we discuss the science targets of KAGRA projects, considering not only the baseline KAGRA (current design) but also its future upgrade candidates (KAGRA+) for the near to middle term (~5 years).
The Kepler Mission Science Operations Center (SOC) performs several critical functions including managing the ~156,000 target stars, associated target tables, science data compression tables and parameters, as well as processing the raw photometric data downlinked from the spacecraft each month. The raw data are first calibrated at the pixel level to correct for bias, smear induced by a shutterless readout, and other detector and electronic effects. A background sky flux is estimated from ~4500 pixels on each of the 84 CCD readout channels, and simple aperture photometry is performed on an optimal aperture for each star. Ancillary engineering data and diagnostic information extracted from the science data are used to remove systematic errors in the flux time series that are correlated with these data prior to searching for signatures of transiting planets with a wavelet-based, adaptive matched filter. Stars with signatures exceeding 7.1 sigma are subjected to a suite of statistical tests including an examination of each stars centroid motion to reject false positives caused by background eclipsing binaries. Physical parameters for each planetary candidate are fitted to the transit signature, and signatures of additional transiting planets are sought in the residual light curve. The pipeline is operational, finding planetary signatures and providing robust eliminations of false positives.
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