NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft — the fastest ever launched — will sweep past Jupiter on Feb. 28, beaming back some of the highest-resolution images of the planet ever seen, NASA officials announced yesterday.
“We hope to answer some of our fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the solar system,” said James Green, director of the solar system division at the NASA headquarters.
New Horizons will use Jupiter’s gravity to accelerate 9,000 mph, boosting it above 52,000 mph on its way to Pluto, said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator. The scientists expect the spacecraft to reach Pluto by July 2015.
The scientists plan to complete a five-month-long study of Pluto and its three moons. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel is managing the mission.
By 2020, they plan for the craft to arrive at the Kuiper Belt, an extremely distant region of icy planetary building blocks.
“This is a whole new frontier,” Stern said. “It’s opening up a window way back in time four and a half billion years to the birth of the planet.”
New Horizons will observe Jupiter and its stormy atmosphere, including the “Little Red Spot,” a storm emerging south of the notorious Great Red Spot. It will also collect data on Jupiter’s four largest moons and ring system, said John Spencer, New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team leader.
The spacecraft will venture into new territory, traveling down a quarter of Jupiter’s “magnetotail,” a flow of charged particles tens of millions of miles long, Spencer said.
“This is the only train going this way, and with these high-tech instruments we’re going to produce some stunning data sets,” Stern said.
Most of the data from the Jupiter flyby will not arrive at Earth until after it passes, he said. “I don’t feel very much anxiety. It’s really been going very smoothly. This is a big test for our mission. Hopefully we’ll turn up any small vulnerabilities and weaknesses.”
