The Voyage
Early Cruise: The first 13 months include spacecraft and instrument checkouts, instrument calibrations, trajectory correction maneuvers, and rehearsals for the Jupiter encounter.
Jupiter Encounter: Closest approach will occur Feb. 28, 2007. Moving about 47,000 miles per hour (about 21 kilometers per second), New Horizons would fly 3 to 4 times closer to Jupiter than the Cassini spacecraft, coming within 32 Jupiter radii of the large planet.
Interplanetary Cruise: activities during the approximately 8-year cruise to Pluto include annual spacecraft and instrument checkouts, trajectory corrections, instrument calibrations and Pluto encounter rehearsals.
Pluto-Charon Encounter
- Close approach: July 14, 2015
- Current 1st graders will see New Horizons arrive at Pluto during the summer before 11th grade!
Into the Kuiper Belt
Plans for an extended mission include one to two encounters of Kuiper Belt Objects, ranging from about 25 to 55 miles (40 to 90 kilometers) in diameter. New Horizons would acquire the same data it collected at Pluto-Charon - where applicable - and follow a timeline similar to the Pluto-Charon encounter:
- Closest Approach - 4 weeks: object observations
- Closest Approach + 2 weeks: post-encounter studies
- Closest Approach + 2 months: all data returned to Earth
