This past week was a busy one for New Horizons. Mission operations practices continued, as did engineering paperwork closeouts.
Other major activities included:
The final tasks associated with mating the spacecraft and third stage to our Atlas launch vehicle.
A suite of integrated electrical testing of the spacecraft-third stage-Atlas stack.
A stress test of the New Horizons spacecraft Power Distribution Unit (PDU) in response to an anomaly investigation surrounding a pair of commands the PDU dropped before executing on 19-20 November.
A dry run of RTG-spacecraft mating activities.
Draining and preparations to begin drying our Atlas fuel tank in preparation for boroscope inspections set for January 3rd and 4th.
The final NASA Headquarters pre-launch mission review.
A mission press conference held at NASA Headquarters.
In other news of the week, New Horizons science team collaborator Marc Buie and four coworkers submitted a research paper to The Astronomical Journal describing some new results about Pluto's just-discovered small satellites, which have been temporarily dubbed "P1" and "P2". This is posted on the
