Optical Navigation Preparations for New Horizons Pluto Flyby

Abstract

The New Horizons spacecraft will encounter Pluto and its satellites in July 2015. As was the case for the Voyager encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, mission success will depend heavily on accurate spacecraft navigation, and accurate navigation will be impossible without the use of pictures of the Pluto system taken by the onboard cameras. We describe the preparations made by the New Horizons optical navigators: picture planning, image processing algorithms, software development and testing, and results from in-flight imaging