Carrying Buckeye technology, New Horizons probe zeroes in on mysterious Ultima Thule after Pluto success

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With Buckeye engineering technology on board, the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is making history and reaching the farthest reaches of space. 

The scheduled New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto.

The probe’s most prominent feature was partially designed, constructed and tested at The Ohio State University ElectroScience Laboratory (ESL) beginning in 2002.

Ohio State electrical and computer engineering alumni Ron Schulze and Willie Theunissen, now distinguished engineers with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHAPL) and Lockheed Martin Space Systems, respectively, both played an integral part in the New Horizons mission.

As JHAPL lead engineer for the high gain antenna dish project, Schulze coordinated its design and worked for months with Theunissen, as well as Ohio State faculty and staff at ESL’s anechoic chamber. Considered the largest university-owned anechoic chamber worldwide, ESL’s facility is 60 feet by 40 feet by 20 feet and operates from 400 MHz up to 100 GHz.

High gain antennas provide focused and narrow radio wave beam widths, allowing for more precise targeting of radio signals. The antenna, created and designed in a partnership between the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Ohio State, remains one of seven instruments on the probe currently gathering scientific information being transmitted back to Earth. Without the dish, NASA could not communicate or receive signals from New Horizons. 

ESL Research Scientist Teh-Hong Lee put the project in some perspective. 

“Because a spacecraft is spinning while it is traveling, they need to maintain the accuracy of pointing the antenna to the Earth. I was told they required the accuracy of pointing to the Earth at .001 degrees. It’s amazing that they can achieve that,” Lee said. “We were also very excited that our antenna facility could accommodate their need.”

Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify its next quarry, a billion miles farther out in the Kuiper Belt. Now it’s crunch time for New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern and his team.

Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said the flyby is more challenging than the Pluto mission. Ultima is tiny, and faint, much harder to navigate toward and communication back to Earth takes much longer.

Dozens of scientists and engineers are due to converge on Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to get set for the flyby, which is scheduled to come closest to Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. on New Year's Day Jan. 1.

If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will pass by Ultima at a distance of 2,200 miles, or less than a third of the distance used for the Pluto flyby. But the mission team is on the watch for any mini-moons that would force a shift to a safer, more distant trajectory.

Neither Stern nor anyone else knows exactly what New Horizons will actually see, because the mission is a first in history. Hubble imagery suggests Ultima Thule measures roughly 20 miles wide — and might consist of two or more mutually orbiting objects. The dearth of knowledge leaves plenty of room for surprises.

“Considering how much we knew about Pluto, and how much it astounded us, here we’re starting from complete scratch,” Stern said in an interview with GeekWire. “We barely know its size and its color. We can’t tell you anything about its composition or its atmosphere, or satellites, any of that. But we’re going to find out.”

To find out, the plutonium-powered New Horizons probe will employ the same suite of scientific instruments that worked so well to study Pluto and its moons more than three years earlier.

It’s likely to take months to send back all the data from the Ultima flyby, just as it did in the wake of 2015’s Pluto flyby. But eventually, Act Two of the New Horizons mission is expected to add to Act One’s already-substantial record of revelations about the icy worlds on the solar system’s edge.

Will there be an Act Three? Stern and colleagues fully intend to ask NASA for another mission extension once Ultima is behind them. At its current speed, New Horizons will be flying through the Kuiper Belt for almost a decade longer, with the team searching for its next flyby target.