From the New Horizons web site:http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20100617.php
I'm pretty sure I'd go stir crazy if I were on the New Horizons team...almost three years since the last TCM. It's good to hear an update, however.
Quote from: iamlucky13 on 06/23/2010 01:44 amI'm pretty sure I'd go stir crazy if I were on the New Horizons team...almost three years since the last TCM. It's good to hear an update, however.They had to be clever in managing personnel resources. They hired a lot of younger people with the expectation that they would still be available when the vehicle reached Pluto in 2015. But it's an interesting issue. Will those people really be available regardless of their ages?There are other potential missions to outer planets that will face the same problems, so I hope that somebody on the NH project eventually writes about these management challenges so that others can learn from them.
Quote from: Blackstar on 06/23/2010 05:13 pmQuote from: iamlucky13 on 06/23/2010 01:44 amI'm pretty sure I'd go stir crazy if I were on the New Horizons team...almost three years since the last TCM. It's good to hear an update, however.They had to be clever in managing personnel resources. They hired a lot of younger people with the expectation that they would still be available when the vehicle reached Pluto in 2015. But it's an interesting issue. Will those people really be available regardless of their ages?There are other potential missions to outer planets that will face the same problems, so I hope that somebody on the NH project eventually writes about these management challenges so that others can learn from them.The question of retention occurred to me, too. I wish them luck keeping experienced team members around for that big week in the relatively distant future. It also seems they contracted out some of the navigation work, presumably because of the low rate they'd be able to utilize on-staff navigation folks:http://www.kinetx.com/services.aspx?p=nav
July 14, 2010Five Years and Counting DownFive years ago, the New Horizons spacecraft was in a thermal-vacuum chamber at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, being tested for our historic voyage to the planetary frontier. Today our intrepid probe is a billion kilometers past Saturn – and exactly five years away from closest Pluto approach on July 14, 2015.Thanks to everyone for the hard work, dedication, persistence, and sheer pluck that got us funded, built, launched and halfway across the solar system. We aren't "turning final" on approach yet, but we can see that day coming in early 2015. Go New Horizons!- Alan SternNew Horizons Principal Investigator
The PI’s Perspective: Visiting Four Moons, in Just Four Years, for All MankindIn June and July, members of the New Horizons science team, using the Hubble Space Telescope, discovered and confirmed that Pluto has a fourth moon! The new satellite, provisionally called P4, is fainter and therefore likely much smaller, than either Nix or Hydra or Charon – Pluto’s other three known moons....
The search area becomes narrower over time as New Horizons's (and Pluto's) orbits become better constrained.