Position of New Horizons on the date and time indicated. Credit: New Horizons website.

The New Horizons spacecraft is well on its way to “it’s not a planet”, Pluto.  The spacecraft is about half way there, so far the flight time has been 1629 days (depending on when you read this) with about 1739 left to go before operations begin.

It turns out a course correction was needed if the planned arrival 7,767 miles above Pluto at 07:49 am July 14, 2015 was going to happen as planned.

The course correction involved sending commands to traverse the more than 1.49 billion miles to the spacecraft – yeah 1.49 billion miles, it takes about 2.25 hours for the radio signals to make the trip one way traveling at the speed of light.  The commands were instructions for a 35.6 second thruster firing that increased the speed of New Horizons by just 1-mph.  The reason for the increase in speed is completely amazing:  it seems a tiny amount of force is created by thermal photons from the radioisotope thermoelectric generator power source, get this, reflecting off the backside of the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna and this force needs to be counter acted.  Pretty cool eh?

The commands were sent and the burn accomplished. . . onward to Pluto we go.

Visit the New Horizons website to learn more about the mission including the current position.