Active extraterrestrial probes

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 66. Chapters: Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Cassini-Huygens, 2001 Mars Odyssey, New Horizons, MESSENGER, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Deep Impact, Stardust, Mars Express, Rosetta, Dawn, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, Venus Express, STEREO, Akatsuki, Pioneer 6, 7, 8, and 9, International Cometary Explorer, Advanced Composition Explorer, TWINS. Excerpt: New Horizons is a NASA robotic spacecraft mission currently en route to the dwarf planet Pluto. It is expected to be the first spacecraft to fly by and study Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix, and Hydra. NASA may also attempt flybys of one or more other Kuiper belt objects. New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, directly into an Earth-and-solar-escape trajectory with an Earth-relative velocity of about 16.26 km/s (58,536 km/h; 36,373 mph) after its last engine shut down. Thus, the spacecraft left Earth at the greatest ever launch speed for a man-made object. It flew by Jupiter on February 28, 2007, the orbit of Saturn on June 8, 2008; and the orbit of Uranus on March 18, 2011: it is projected to reach Pluto on July 14, 2015, after which it will continue farther into the Kuiper belt. As of 26 April 2011, the spacecraft is traveling at 15.70 km/s, or about 3.335 AU a year, at a distance of 19.34 AU from Earth, just beyond the orbit of Uranus. The spacecraft is at a declination of -21.15 degrees, at a right ascension of 18.802 hours. Light takes 2.69 hours to reach the spacecraft, meaning that the round trip time for a radio signal is about 5.3 hours. New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers mission category, larger and more expensive than Discovery missions but smaller than the Flagship Program. The cost of the mission (including spacecraft and instrument development, launch vehicle, mission operations, data analysis, and education/public outreach) is approximately $650 million over 15 years (from 2001 to 2016). An earlier proposed Pluto mission - Pluto Kuiper Express - was cancelled by NASA in 2000 for budgetary reasons. Further information relating to an overview with historical context can be found at the IEEE website and gives further background and details, with more details regarding the Jupiter fly-by. The spacecraft was built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). The mis