ASSOCIATED PRESS
A piano-size probe destined to be the first to study Pluto is being shaken, baked and frozen in two Maryland labs in preparation for a 10-year trip to the edge of the solar system.
The New Horizons probe was shipped last month from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where it was designed and built, to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., for the second round of testing.
At the Hopkins lab, the probe was tested on a “shake table” that simulates the vibrations it will experience during the launch atop an Atlas V rocket, one of NASA’s largest launch vehicles.
At Goddard, it will be spun to check the probe’s balance and alignment, placed in front of wall-size speakers that simulate the noise of a launch, and then put into a four-story thermal vacuum chamber that will expose the probe to the extreme temperature swings and airless conditions of space.
If the 1,000-pound probe passes all the tests, it will be shipped this fall to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be launched in January or early February. Any delay would add about three years to the trip to Pluto because Jupiter would not be in the right position to give the probe a gravity boost along the way, said project scientist Hal Weaver of the Applied Physics Laboratory.
As launch rockets have become more powerful, pushing their payloads into space at much higher speeds, such testing has become even more important, Mr. Weaver said. New Horizons, for example, will pass the moon in nine hours, compared with three days for the Apollo astronauts in the 1970s, and is expected to reach Jupiter in 13 months, instead of the six years needed for the Galileo probe in the early 1990s, Mr. Weaver said.
The probe also will study the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy objects at the edge of the solar system. The belt is thought to be the source of most short-period comets, those with orbits less than 200 years, and scientists are looking to compare the composition and surface properties of Pluto and Charon to those of comets.
New Horizons should reach the Kuiper Belt about three years after passing Pluto.
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