Adam Hibberd
For various reasons to do with research, I had to recompute the launch ascent trajectory for the New Horizons mission.
New Horizons was a probe sent to Pluto and took various outstanding images and measurements of this very distant dwarf planet.
But it had to be launched into space in the first place, so how did NASA manage that precisely?
Since Pluto is far away, to get there in any reasonable and practical span of time, required a LOT of speed, which translates to a very powerful launch vehicle, which in turn translates to lots of booster stages.
New Horzions was launched on an ATLAS V launch platform as the first stage, equipped with a full 5 solid strap-on boosters.
Once out of the atmosphere it fired a powerful (high specific impulse) liquid cryogenic booster stage known as a ‘Centaur’.
A Centaur has the advantage that its engine can be stopped at some point (for a coast arc) and then restarted later on at a more propitious moment, very handy for interplanetary missions.
In addition the New Horizons mission had a STAR 48B booster to send the probe from an elliptical Sun-bound orbit to a Sun-escape orbit, towards Jupiter in fact, whereupon a gravity assist would be conducted to arrive at Pluto even sooner.
I show attached two plots of the ground track followed by the mission, one generated by my own software – namely LVAS (Launch Vehicle Ascent Software) – and the other representing the actual ground track which I unearthed from the world wide web.
