NASA's New Horizons spacecraft carried out a short, 2.5-minute engine burn on Saturday, Dec. 9 that refined its course toward 2014 MU69, the ancient Kuiper Belt object it will fly by a little more than a year from now.

Setting a record for the farthest spacecraft course correction to date, the engine burn also adjusted the arrival time at MU69 to optimize flyby science.

Telemetry confirming that the maneuver went as planned reached the New Horizons mission operations center around 1 p.m. EST at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, via NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) stations in Goldstone, California. The radio signals carrying the data traveled over 3.8 billion miles (6.1 billion kilometers) and took five hours and 41 minutes to reach Earth at the speed of light.

Operating by timed commands stored on its computer, New Horizons fired its thrusters for 152 seconds, adjusting its velocity by about 151 centimeters per second, a little more than three miles per hour. The maneuver both refined the course toward and optimized the flyby arrival time at MU69, by setting closest approach to 12:33 a.m. EST (5:33 UTC) on Jan. 1, 2019.

The prime flyby distance is set at 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers); the timing provides better visibility for DSN's powerful antennas to reflect radar waves off the surface of MU69 for New Horizons to receive - a difficult experiment that, if it succeeds, will help scientists determine the reflectivity and roughness of MU69's surface.

Today's maneuver was the last trajectory correction during the spacecraft's long "cruise" between Pluto, which it flew past in July 2015, and the MU69 flyby. New Horizons Mission Design Lead Yanping Guo, of APL, said the next course-correction opportunity comes in October 2018, at the start of the MU69 approach phase. The mission team is using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission to hone its aim toward MU69, which was discovered in 2014.

"We are on course and getting more excited all the time; this flyby is now barely a year away!" said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

The mission team will put the New Horizons spacecraft into hibernation mode on Dec. 21, where it will stay until early next June. The spacecraft is healthy and speeding away from the Sun at 31,786 miles (51,156 kilometers) per hour, or over 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) per day.

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Wrapping up 2017 one year out from MU69
Boulder CO (SPX) Dec 07, 2017
New Horizons is in good health and cruising closer each day to its next encounter: a flyby of the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) 2014 MU69 (or "MU69" for short). If you follow our mission, you likely know that flyby will occur on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day 2019, which is just barely over a year from now! As I write this, New Horizons is wrapping up an active period that began when the spa ... read more

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