The math behind New Horizons

[Peter1469]

The math behind New Horizons

Pictures will start coming back from Pluto. But in the meantime check out the complicated math that got New Horizons to our furthest planet. (Yes I know it was downgraded to dwarf.)

On July 14th, the New Horizons spacecraft will make history when it sails past Pluto, formerly known as the ninth planet. Even more incredible is how fast we got there. The spacecraft traveled 3 billion miles in nine and a half years. That’s about a million miles a day for almost ten years. How the heck did we do it?

Thanks to its quick start, New Horizons made the 500 million mile journey to Jupiter in just over a year, faster than any of the seven previous Jupiter-bound missions.But the sun’s gravitational pull is relentless, and by the time New Horizons reached Jupiter in early 2007, it had slowed to (a mere!) 43,000 miles per hour. Jupiter would help New Horizons regain what it had lost.


As it neared the gas giant, New Horizons began to speed up once more, reeled in by Jupiter’s prodigious gravity, which also acted to bend the spacecraft’s trajectory. On February 28th, 2007, the tiny probe made its closest approach to the gas giant and then flung itself away, snagging a bit of Jupiter’s momentum in a move that rocket scientists call a ‘gravity assist.’ Essentially, as New Horizons was dragged into Jupiter’s gravitational field, it gained kinetic energy amounting to nearly 9,000 miles per hour worth of speed, increasing its velocity to over 52,000 miles per hour.

Read more at the link

[whatukno]

nh-7-10-15_pluto_image_nasa-jhuapl-swri_0.jpg

Here's from the other day, I'm excited to see the hi res close ups a couple days from now.

[Peter1469]

Not long now.

[Don]

Math is important. So is communication between all parties involved. Remember this from 1999?

NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday. The units mismatch prevented navigation information from transferring between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team in at Lockheed Martin in Denver and the flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

OOPS!

[Redrose]

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12:33am July 15, 2015

I wonder what that scar is on the underside.

[Ngc1514]

The amazing thing is that the math necessary to plot the path of New Horizon was all invented by Newton back in the 17th Century. His 3 laws of planetary motion and law of universal gravity were all that were needed. Of course a couple computers sped the process along... Here is an image of the "computers" at Harvard Observatory back around 1890.



Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering and his "Harem" in 1913.