New Horizons Mission Operations and Encounter Planning

Abstract

New Horizons was the first mission to Pluto. The spacecraft was launched on January 19, 2006, and flew by Pluto on July 14, 2015, returning historic images and data that revealed new insights about the Pluto system. It then flew by Arrokoth on January 1, 2019. But work on New Horizons began long before 2006, including many years of effort to design and propose the mission, build the spacecraft and its instruments, and develop and implement the mission operations concept. This article describes the mission operations concept for both nominal and encounter planning as well as anomaly resolution. It details the challenges of operating a spacecraft that will fly across the solar system and how the mission operations team met these challenges, including the technical hurdles in implementing science observation requirements into spacecraft commands; the balancing of spacecraft communication and science observation periods; the constraints imposed by the spacecraft subsystems; the distances (and thus time delay) between the mission operations center on Earth and the spacecraft; and the programmatic constraints to control mission operations costs for this long mission.