After more than nine years in space, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, is on course for a dramatic flight past the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons in July 2015. The spacecraft is now closer to Pluto than the Earth is to the Sun and 27 of the sensors capturing this journey are provided by Chelmsford based company, e2v.
Innovators in space imaging, e2v have had their equipment on board over 150 space missions by the world’s largest space agencies, including NASA, in a bid to help solve the mysteries of the Universe and understand climate change on Earth.
Record breaking New Horizons
New Horizons is travelling at nearly 33,000 miles per hour, and its journey from Earth to Pluto has covered almost 32 AU — about 3 billion miles.
"This is an amazing project — one that will go down in the history 21st century achievements. And the history-making is just beginning — in July we reach Pluto, humankind’s farthest exploration shore, to explore it and its fascinating system of moons for the first time!"
Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado
The New Horizons mission set another historic marker on March 10, performing the record-distance trajectory correction burn in the history of spaceflight. New Horizons was 2.96 billion miles from the Sun at the time of the manoeuver; Voyager 2, the previous record-holder, was approximately 2.8 billion miles for its last engine burn near Neptune in August 1989.
e2v’s long history with space
e2v’s expertise has resulted in 30 years involvement with some of the highest profile space science projects, including being the eyes for NASA’s Hubble space telescope, providing the largest sensor array for ESA’s GAIA mission to map the Milky Way and work for the Russian-led World Space Observatory.
Source [John Hopkins University]
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