The New Horizons Spacecraft

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.Comment: 33 pages, 13 figures, 4 tables; To appear in a special volume of Space Science Reviews on the New Horizons missio

A HIGH SPEED REAL TIME SPACE QUALIFIED TIME DIVISION MULTIPLEXED DATA FORMATTER

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, CaliforniaA system to generate a contiguous high speed time division multiplexed (TDM) spacecraft downlink data stream has been developed. The 25 MBPS downlink data stream contains high rate real time imager data, intermediate rate subsystem processor data, and low rate spacecraft housekeeping data. Imager data is transferred directly into the appropriate TDM downlink data window using control signals and clocks generated in the central data formatter and distributed to the data sources. Cable and electronics delays inherent in this process can amount to several clock periods, while the uncertainty and variations in those delays (e.g. temperature effects) can exceed the clock period. Unique (patent pending) electronic circuitry has been included in the data formatter to sense the total data gathering delay for each high speed data source and use the results to control series programmable delay elements to equalize the delays from all sources and permit the formation of a contiguous output data stream.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection