Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
New Horizons made it look super easy, but it's actually really difficult getting to Pluto. This is Pluto in a Minute.
Designing a trajectory for a flyby mission to Pluto involves working backwards from what you want to do when you get into the system, at least, that's the way Yanping Guo approached the problem. She began by looking at the science the team wanted to get done while at Pluto, and there were two very interesting design constraints, namely, there were two occultations, one from the Sun and one from the Earth. The spacecraft had to fly behind Pluto and have both the Sun and the Earth on the opposite side of the planet at the same time. There are only two times in the Earth year when that happens, once in January and once in July.
So knowing the month that New Horizons would arrive at Pluto, Guo then worked backwards to figure out what the best year would be. Picking the right year comes down to launch. You want to launch with the fastest velocity but the lowest energy. In the case of New Horizons there was one window in 2006.
Knowing the launch point and the launch velocity, Guo then calculated every way New Horizons could get to Pluto given its launch window, which was 35 days long, which meant 35 different trajectories.
And of course, New Horizons only followed one of these 35 trajectories, but even that was really quite complicated. There were an additional 25 course correction burns to fine tune the trajectory on approach to Pluto, but the team only made nine.
So, do you guys have a better appreciation for just how hard it is to get to Pluto? For more on Pluto be sure to check out the New Horizons websites, join the conversation online with the hashtag #PlutoFlyby, and of course, keep coming back right here for more Pluto in a Minute.
nasa.gov/newhorizons
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu
New Horizons made it look super easy, but it's actually really difficult getting to Pluto. This is Pluto in a Minute.
Designing a trajectory for a flyby mission to Pluto involves working backwards from what you want to do when you get into the system, at least, that's the way Yanping Guo approached the problem. She began by looking at the science the team wanted to get done while at Pluto, and there were two very interesting design constraints, namely, there were two occultations, one from the Sun and one from the Earth. The spacecraft had to fly behind Pluto and have both the Sun and the Earth on the opposite side of the planet at the same time. There are only two times in the Earth year when that happens, once in January and once in July.
So knowing the month that New Horizons would arrive at Pluto, Guo then worked backwards to figure out what the best year would be. Picking the right year comes down to launch. You want to launch with the fastest velocity but the lowest energy. In the case of New Horizons there was one window in 2006.
Knowing the launch point and the launch velocity, Guo then calculated every way New Horizons could get to Pluto given its launch window, which was 35 days long, which meant 35 different trajectories.
And of course, New Horizons only followed one of these 35 trajectories, but even that was really quite complicated. There were an additional 25 course correction burns to fine tune the trajectory on approach to Pluto, but the team only made nine.
So, do you guys have a better appreciation for just how hard it is to get to Pluto? For more on Pluto be sure to check out the New Horizons websites, join the conversation online with the hashtag #PlutoFlyby, and of course, keep coming back right here for more Pluto in a Minute.
nasa.gov/newhorizons
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu
