NASA’s New Horizons Mission Adds Student-Designed Dust Counter

It’s a 20-year homework assignment, but you won’t hear any complaints from
the students handed the task.

A special instrument, called the Student Dust Counter, has been added to
NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Designed by
students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the device will detect
dust grains produced by collisions between asteroids, comets and Kuiper Belt
objects during New Horizons’ journey. It would be the first science
instrument on a NASA planetary mission to be designed, built and “flown” by
students.

With faculty supervision, University of Colorado students will also
distribute and archive data from the instrument, and lead a comprehensive
education and outreach effort to bring their results and experiences to
classrooms of all grades over the next two decades. Students in schools and
universities nationwide will be able to share in both the development of the
instrument and analysis of its data.

“The Student Dust Counter is an incredibly exciting addition to our
mission,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, director
of the Southwest Research Institute’s Space Studies Department in Boulder.
“Not only will it give us the most detailed accounting yet of dust particle
concentrations in the outer solar system, it will offer generations of
students a real, hands-on role in a pioneering NASA space mission. I am
thrilled that NASA’s Office of Space Science approved this addition to New
Horizons and I hope it opens the door to student-led experiments on more
missions.”

Now in preliminary design, New Horizons is planning for launch in 2006 or
2007, a swing past Jupiter, and an encounter with Pluto and its moon,
Charon, as early as July 2015. In the following years it will explore from
one to three icy, rocky mini-worlds in the Kuiper Belt, billions of miles
beyond Neptune’s orbit. The nuclear-powered probe’s payload includes cameras
and sensors for imaging the surfaces of Pluto, Charon and Kuiper Belt
objects, mapping their compositions and temperatures, and studying Pluto’s
complex atmosphere in detail.

Though the dust counter is part of the mission’s education and public
outreach program – rather than the main science payload – it will in fact
contribute significant science. Because no dust detector has ever flown
beyond 18 astronomical units from the Sun (nearly 1.7 billion miles, about
the distance of Uranus), the Student Dust Counter’s data may be as valuable
to researchers as the project’s outreach focus is to students.

“Those measurements will give us a better handle on the sources and
transport of dust in the solar system,” says New Horizons Project Scientist
Dr. Andrew Cheng, of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
in Laurel, Md.

First proposed to the New Horizons team last spring, the Student Dust
Counter underwent a successful design review in October. NASA approved the
project in November and the instrument is set for another, more detailed
review next spring. Like New Horizons’ other six instruments, the Student
Dust Counter must be completed by summer 2004 for installation on the
spacecraft and rigorous testing.

“We have our work cut out for us,” says Gene Holland, an aerospace
engineering graduate student at the University of Colorado and the
instrument’s student project manager. “But at the same time, that’s what
makes the project so exciting. We have a lot of responsibility on a major
space mission. The students feel like what they’re doing will make a real
difference.”

Now that NASA has approved the dust counter’s addition to the spacecraft,
Holland says the team designing and building the device will expand from
four to nearly 20 graduate and undergraduate members. It will include
engineering and science students – of course – and others studying for
careers in business, education and communications. “We want to involve
students in every aspect of this project,” Stern says. “This is a
multi-generational student experiment. The current team will build it, but
future generations will operate it, analyze the data and publish results.”

And they’re ready to get started.

“The students are jumping up and down about this – they can’t wait to get
involved,” says Dr. Fran Bagenal, a professor in the University of Colorado
Department of Astrophysical, Planetary & Atmospheric Sciences and the
science leader on the New Horizons education-public outreach team. “They are
going to build it, they are going to examine the data, and they are going to
tell other students how this works and why this is so cool. They have a
unique opportunity to both educate and inspire the students who will follow
them, because there are kids in kindergarten today who could be working on
this when New Horizons reaches Pluto.”

On the Web

An image of the Student Dust Counter team leaders and a diagram of the
instrument are available at
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/121702_pix.htm

For more information on the Student Dust Counter project, visit http://www.colorado.edu/PublicRelations/NewsReleases/2002/2000.html.

For more information on the New Horizons mission, visit
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.

Exploring New Frontiers

New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto, its moon, Charon, and the Kuiper
Belt of rocky, icy objects beyond. Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern,
director of the Southwest Research Institute’s Space Studies Department,
Boulder, Colo., leads a mission team that includes major partners at The
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.;
Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; Ball Aerospace Corp., Boulder; NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; and the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. APL manages the mission for NASA and will
design, build and operate the New Horizons spacecraft.