Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager on New Horizons

Abstract

The LOng-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is the high resolution imaging instrument for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, its giant satellite Charon, its small moons Nix and Hydra, and the Kuiper Belt, which is the vast region of icy bodies extending roughly from Neptune's orbit out to 50 astronomical units (AU). New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006 as the inaugural mission in NASA's New Frontiers program. LORRI is a narrow angle (field of view=0.29 deg), high resolution (4.95 microrad pixels), Ritchey-Chretien telescope with a 20.8 cm diameter primary mirror, a focal length of 263 cm, and a three lens field-flattening assembly. A 1024 x 1024 pixel (optically active region), thinned, backside-illuminated charge-coupled device (CCD) detector is used in the focal plane unit and is operated in frame transfer mode. LORRI provides panchromatic imaging over a bandpass that extends approximately from 350 nm to 850 nm. LORRI operates in an extreme thermal environment, situated inside the warm spacecraft with a large, open aperture viewing cold space. LORRI has a silicon carbide optical system, designed to maintain focus over the operating temperature range without a focus adjustment mechanism. Moreover, the spacecraft is thruster-stabilized without reaction wheels, placing stringent limits on the available exposure time and the optical throughput needed to satisfy the measurement requirements.

31 pages, 12 figures, 8 tables; To appear in a special volume of Space Science Reviews on the New Horizons mission

References in corpus (1)

• The Discovery of Two New Satellites of Pluto

Cited by in corpus (43)

• Surface Compositions Across Pluto and Charon
• The Atmosphere of Pluto as Observed by New Horizons
• Impact Craters on Pluto and Charon Indicate a Deficit of Small Kuiper Belt Objects
• Pluto's global surface composition through pixel-by-pixel Hapke modeling of New Horizons Ralph/LEISA data
• Mean radius and shape of Pluto and Charon from New Horizons images
• Global Albedos of Pluto and Charon from LORRI New Horizons Observations
• The Geology and Geophysics of Kuiper Belt Object (486958) Arrokoth
• The Small Satellites of Pluto as Observed by New Horizons
• The Pluto System After New Horizons
• Haze in Pluto's Atmosphere
• Color, Composition, and Thermal Environment of Kuiper Belt Object (486958) Arrokoth
• Anomalous Flux in the Cosmic Optical Background Detected With New Horizons Observations
• New Horizons Observations of the Cosmic Optical Background
• Measurement of the Cosmic Optical Background using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on New Horizons
• Pluto's Haze as a Surface Material
• Formation of Charon's Red Poles From Seasonally Cold-Trapped Volatiles
• Testing black hole no-hair theorem with OJ287
• The New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission
• Jupiter Science Enabled by ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer
• New Horizons Constraints on Charon's Present Day Atmosphere
• The cosmic optical background excess, dark matter, and line-intensity mapping
• A Measurement of the Cosmic Optical Background and Diffuse Galactic Light Scaling from the R < 50 AU New Horizons-LORRI Data
• In-Flight Performance and Calibration of the LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) for the New Horizons Mission
• Regional study of Europa's photometry
• Interstellar Now! Missions to and Sample Returns from Nearby Interstellar Objects
• The First High-Phase Observations of a KBO: New Horizons Imaging of (15810) 1994 JR1 from the Kuiper Belt
• The global distribution of active Ionian Volcanoes and implications for tidal heating models
• Photometry of Kuiper Belt Object (486958) Arrokoth from New Horizons LORRI
• The Evolving Flow of Jupiter's White Ovals and Adjacent Cyclones
• Superresolution Reconstruction of Severely Undersampled Point-spread Functions Using Point-source Stacking and Deconvolution
• The Color and Binarity of (486958) 2014 MU69 and Other Long-Range New Horizons Kuiper Belt Targets
• A Search for Temporal Changes on Pluto and Charon
• Evidence for Possible Clouds in Pluto's Present Day Atmosphere
• Astrophysics with New Horizons: Making the Most of a Generational Opportunity
• A bimodal distribution of haze in Pluto's atmosphere
• Distribution and Energy Balance of Pluto's Nitrogen Ice, as seen by New Horizons in 2015
• Image processing for precise geometry determination
• Heliocentric Distance Dependence of Zodiacal Light Observed by Hayabusa2#
• Chasing Nomadic Worlds: A New Class of Deep Space Missions
• Pluto Geologic Map: Use of Crater Data to Understand Age Relationships
• A machine-generated catalogue of Charon's craters and implications for the Kuiper belt
• Investigating the extent of bladed terrain on Pluto via photometric surface roughness
• New Investigations of Dark Floored Pits in the Volatile Ice of Sputnik Planitia on Pluto