NASA's New Horizons gets Gravity Boost from Jupiter

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, the fastest ever built by human, on Wednesday successfully got a gravity boost from gas-giant Jupiter, the largest planet of the solar system, and pointed toward Pluto and the frozen, sunless reaches of the solar system on a nine-year journey.

The fastest spacecraft ever launched was scheduled to make its closest pass to Jupiter, the fifth from the sun, on Feb. 28, 2007, and get some extra boost while passing the most massive planet in the solar system.

The probe was within a million and a half miles (2.5 million km) of Jupiter at 12:43 a.m. EST (0543 GMT) early yesterday, giving scientists a close-up look at the giant gaseous planet and its four moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Last year in January, NASA launched this unmanned, piano-sized probe intended to study Pluto’s, the ninth and usually farthest planet from the sun, peculiar zone of icy objects that surrounds the coldest planet at the outer edges of the planetary system. NASA's compact, 1,050-pound spacecraft worth $700m, is due to reach Pluto in July 2015.

The spacecraft took off on an Atlas V rocket and speeded away from Earth at 36,000 mph, the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It used the giant planet’s gravity as a slingshot, shaving five years off the 3-billion-mile (4.8 billion km) voyage to Pluto.

"The spacecraft is outbound from Jupiter and we're on our way to Pluto," said Alice Bowman, New Horizons Mission Operations Manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "The swing by was a success; the spacecraft is on course and performed just as we expected."

The spacecraft which is already the fastest ever launched is getting nearly 9,000 mph (14,500 km per hour) from Jupiter's gravity, and now accelerating at more than 52,000 mph (84,000 km per hour).

The probe has covered nearly 500 million miles (800 million km) since its launch on January 19, 2006, and reached Jupiter faster than seven previous spacecraft, including Voyager 1, Galileo and Cassini, to visit the solar system's largest planet.

The spacecraft, designed and built at the lab in Laurel and tested at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, is equipped with state-of-the-art seven science instruments.

The probe will take more than 700 science observations of the Jupiter system by the end of June. Besides taking the first-ever trip down the long "tail" of Jupiter's magnetosphere, a wide stream of charged particles that extends tens of millions of kilometers beyond the planet, the probe will also explore closely the "Little Red Spot," a nascent storm south of Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot.

"This is a region never before seen," Project manager Glen Fountain said.

Once the New Horizons arrives on Pluto in July 2015, it will spend five months probing this unexplored dwarf planet and its three moons: the largest moon Charon, and two smaller, more distant moons, Hydra and Nix.

And, if all goes well, it could study one or more smaller worlds in the Kuiper Belt, the region at the far reaches of the solar system of ancient, rocky and icy bodies.