New Horizons spacecraft controllers are calculating whether to tweak the spacecraft's trajectory this week, to adjust its flight path toward Pluto during a fling past Jupiter, following a flawless Jan. 19 Atlas V launch. The NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) spacecraft is already 4 million mi. from Earth and lining up for its critical Jupiter gravity assist maneuver in February 2007. For flights beyond Saturn, the $700-million New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is the most potent U.S. planetary flight since the launch of Voyager 2 here 29 years ago. New Horizons will arrive at Pluto on July 14, 2015, exactly 50 years after Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to fly by Mars, the initial planetary mission sent outbound from Earth away from the Sun. New Horizons also fired off at 36,256 mph. with some of the cremated ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930 and died in 1997 at age 90.
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