spacetoday.net: New Horizons ready for Jupiter flyby

Posted: Fri, Jan 19, 2007, 7:11 AM ET (1211 GMT)
New Horizons flyby of Jupiter illustration (NASA)

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, launched last year on a mission to the distant dwarf planet Pluto, is set to fly past Jupiter next month, project officials said Thursday. The spacecraft will make its closest approach to the solar system's largest planet on February 28th, passing 2.3 million kilometers from the planet. The flyby is designed to provide a gravity assist to the spacecraft, boosting its speed by over 14,000 km/h to 84,000 km/h, allowing the spacecraft to fly past Pluto in July 2015. During the flyby the spacecraft will take images of and collect other data from the planet, its magnetosphere, and its moons, which will be stored by the spacecraft and transmitted back to Earth starting in March.