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Posted by baalke on June 29, 2006, 5:56 pm
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http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/062906.html
For Immediate Release
June 29, 2006
Pluto-Bound, Student-Built Dust Detector Renamed "Venetia,"
Honoring Girl Who Named Ninth Planet
The student-built science instrument on NASA's New Horizons mission to
Pluto has been renamed to honor one of astronomy's most famous students
- the "little girl" who named the ninth planet more than 75 years ago.
For the rest of the New Horizons spacecraft's voyage to Pluto and the
Kuiper Belt beyond, the Student Dust Counter - the first science
instrument on a NASA planetary mission to be designed, built and
operated by students - will be known as the Venetia Burney Student Dust
Counter (VBSDC), or "Venetia" for short. The tag honors Venetia Burney
Phair, who at age 11 offered the name "Pluto" for the newly discovered
ninth planet in 1930.
"It's fitting that we name an instrument built by students after Mrs.
Phair, who was just a grade-school student herself in England when she
made her historic suggestion of a name for Pluto," says Dr. Alan Stern,
the New Horizons mission principal investigator, of the Southwest
Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. "It's also a great honor to
recognize
Mrs. Phair for her historic, early role in the saga of the ninth
planet."
"I feel quite astonished, and to have an instrument named after me is
an
honor," says Venetia Burney Phair, now 87 and living in Epsom, England.
"I never dreamt when I was 11, that after all these years, people would
still be thinking about this and even sending a probe to Pluto. It's
remarkable."
The instrument, designed, built and currently operated by students and
faculty advisors at the University of Colorado, Boulder, begins full
science operations in July after a series of post-launch tests and
checkouts.
Officially a mission Education and Public Outreach project, "Venetia"
is
counting and measuring dust particle impacts on New Horizons along the
spacecraft's entire trajectory to produce information on their
production, transport and loss and, by inference, the population of
comets and other distant colliding bodies that are too small to detect
with telescopes. The dust counter could also be used to search for dust
in the Pluto system; such dust might be generated by collisions of tiny
impactors on Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra.
The device combines two major elements: an 18-by-12-inch detector
mounted on the outside of the spacecraft, and an electronics box inside
the craft that determines the mass and speed of the particles that hit
the detector. Because no dust detector has ever flown beyond 18
astronomical units from the Sun (nearly 1.7 billion miles, about the
distance from Uranus to the Sun), Venetia's data will give scientists
unprecedented measurements of the size and spatial distribution of dust
in the outer solar system.
With faculty support, 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.
"The project has involved dozens of students who had a unique
opportunity to design, build, test and operate a real instrument in
deep
space," says Mihaly Horanyi, research associate at the University of
Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and principal
investigator for the student instrument." Generations of future
students
will be involved in handing over their skills to the group that follows
them."
New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on
Jan. 19, 2006. It zipped past the orbit of Mars on April 7, and next
February will fly through the Jupiter system for science studies and a
gravity assist, which will send it toward an historic rendezvous with
Pluto and its moons in July 2015. The mission team also hopes to
examine
one or more objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto in succeeding
years.
The spacecraft was built and is being operated at the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., which manages the
New Horizons mission for NASA. SwRI's Stern leads the mission and the
science team as principal investigator.
On the Web:
* For more information on the instrument, visit
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sdc/
* Read and listen to a January 2006 NASA interview with Venetia
Burney Phair at: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/
transcript_pluto_naming_podcast.html
<http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/transcript_pluto_naming_podcast.html>
Media Contact:
Michael Buckley
(240) 228-7536 or (443) 778-7536
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu
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