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NASA Goddard Joins Team to Explore the Solar System's Final Frontier At the edge of our solar system lies a frigid double planet that has never been visited by spacecraft -- Pluto. Goddard has joined a team led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), San Antonio, Texas, to begin preliminary design studies for what could be the first spacecraft to visit this remote world -- the New Horizons mission. Goddard will provide an infrared spectrometer, called the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA), to the camera system on board the New Horizons spacecraft. A spectrometer breaks light down into its component colors, much like a prism separates white light into a rainbow. Each compound emits a unique pattern of colors, like an optical barcode. By separating light from a celestial object into various distinct colors, a spectrometer reveals the optical barcode of any material present. With this information from LEISA, astronomers will determine what Pluto and Charon, Pluto's unusually large moon, are made of, at least on their surfaces. "We are thrilled to collaborate with the Goddard Space Flight Center," said Dr. Alan Stern of SwRI, Principal Investigator for the New Horizons mission. "Goddard has world-class people and world-class technology." "Pluto is nearly three billion miles from the Sun, more than thirty times farther away than Earth, so remote, very little is known about it," said Dr. Donald Jennings, a Co-Investigator for New Horizons at Goddard. "Even with the Hubble Space Telescope, Pluto's surface features remain a tantalizing blur. Sending a spacecraft for a close-up view is the only way to learn more about Pluto, whose moon, Charon, is so large that Pluto qualifies as a double planet." For the complete
article on the New Horizons mission, go to:
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