January 2006
New Horizons begins its long journey to Pluto

Larry Esposito - An Atlas 5 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 19 January to send NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto, its moon Charon and the Kuiper Belt. The spacecraft includes LASP’s Student Dust Counter (SDC). “The dust grains are of high interest to researchers because they are the building blocks of the solar system’s planets,” said Mihaly Horanyi, principal investigator for the student instrument. It will arrive at Pluto in 2015, after a gravity assist from Jupiter in 2007.

New Horizons will photograph the two small moons discovered in November 2005 and check for rings around Pluto. The Kuiper Belt region, which lies beyond Neptune, consists of perhaps tens of thousands of icy objects spread out between 30 and 50 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Some astronomers say Pluto is not a true planet at all, and should be classed instead alongside these icy relics from the formation of the Solar System. Fran Bagenal, co-investigator on the mission, said, “We never got a good view of what it looks like, even with the best telescopes— even with Hubble. It just looks like a fuzzy blob.”

SDC "Space" Dust Collector