<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="font-family: Helvetica; "></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">* <b>New Horizons</b> - August 24, 2012</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><b>The PI's Perspective</b></span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><b>The Kuiper Belt at 20: Paradigm Changes in Our Knowledge of the Solar System</b></span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">"New Horizons hopes to explore beyond Pluto, into the ancient and unexplored Kuiper Belt.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">New Horizons remains healthy and on course, now more than 24 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is. This summer's spacecraft and payload checkout went extremely well, as did both major flight-software updates we loaded aboard New Horizons. And, the spacecraft's rehearsal of the closest-approach day of the Pluto encounter went just about perfectly.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">After finishing all of this at the beginning of July, we put New Horizons back into hibernation, and we've been cruising that way for almost eight weeks. As those who follow New Horizons on Twitter (@NewHorizons2015) know, every Monday New Horizons checks in with a beacon that tells us if all is well, or not. And almost every week we've been able to report a "green beacon Monday" to our 22,000-plus Twitter followers, indicating the spacecraft is in good health.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">New Horizons will cruise quietly in hibernation until Jan. 6, 2013, when we wake it up for a month of complex activities, including some advance work on next summer's checkout, and the third of the four major software upgrades needed before next summer's on-spacecraft rehearsal of the nine days surrounding Pluto closest approach.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">Since activity on New Horizons is pretty quiet right now, I'll take this opportunity to mention that planetary science is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt. That came in 1992, when the first Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) was discovered.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">Actually, of course, the first object in the Kuiper Belt was discovered in 1930 — Pluto itself; and the second such object, Pluto's giant moon Charon, was discovered in 1978. The Kuiper Belt was first postulated — most famously by Gerard Kuiper — by planetary scientists back in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. But it took until 1992 for technology to mature sufficiently enough to find another object (outside the Pluto system) orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune."</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; color: rgb(4, 51, 255); "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; color: #000000">Find New Horizons in the iTunes App Store here. (<a href="http://itunes.com/apps/newhorizonsanasavoyagetopluto"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; ">http://itunes.com/apps/newhorizonsanasavoyagetopluto</span></a>)</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; color: rgb(4, 51, 255); "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; color: #000000"><b>New Horizons gallery</b> <a href="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; ">http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/</span></a>.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Courier; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">For more information on the New Horizons mission - the first mission to the ninth planet - visit the New Horizons home page: <a href="http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(4, 51, 255); ">http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/</span></a>.</span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; "></div></body></html>