New Horizons update: Cruising from Earth to Jupiter

Published: Feb 10, 2006
Source: www.spaceflightnow.com



New Horizons continues to do well in flight - three weeks down and 492 to go. With more than 99% of the journey to the Pluto system still ahead of us, you might say we are just beginning - and we are. But we have retired much of the risk we worried about to reaching Pluto by getting a good launch and having our spacecraft perform well with most of its basic functionality now checked out.
Recent tests have included checkout of our high-gain and medium-gain antenna communications, checkouts of the spacecraft's ability to autonomously find and point to the Sun and the Earth, and the calibration of our onboard gyros, technically called IMUs (short for Inertial Measurement Units).continue..