The seven science instruments onboard New Horizons are ingeniously designed. They weigh little on average and each uses no more power than a household nightlight and they are intended to work together seamlessly. Scientists picked things for most of our instruments. Instruments have Rex and Alice and Ralph and it is just a happy family. The black and white telephoto camera called Lorri will be used for navigation in the months before closest approach and a study Pluto's surface. The Lorri is long-range reconnaissance imager it is the biggest most powerful camera in terms of resolving power. The cameras are key for over 60 years.


Ralph is the main color camera it is also the camera that is going to take main global maps of Pluto. By this, we can get in and map at scales of kilometers and sub kilometers and even down to tens of meters. Football field sized Pluto we are going to be able to know to things thousands of times more precisely than what we have been to do with Hubble Space Telescope.
Ralph's sister instruments using the different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. We will be studying that. The Alice ultraviolet spectrometer will probe the composition of Pluto's atmosphere and also study its surface. It measures like the shorter wavelength, The antenna direction turns to point back at Pluto back towards the sun and as the sun passes behind Pluto, the sunlight can absorb at these ultraviolet wavelengths and we can tell what the atmosphere made out of at these different heights.

Along its nine years voyage, New Horizons will also be collecting some very important samples of dust. What's the big deal about dust, we have dust everywhere dust in the house, dust outside and dust all out the solar system. Well dust comes from the grinding up of material that gets shed around the case of the solar system we believe that the dust that is flying around the solar system was produced by the grinding up of asteroids, the grinding out of Kuiper belt objects, the ground up of ring particles and so on that is leftover from the process of not just forming the solar system but it is constant evolution over time.

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So the last of the seven instruments is a special dust counter but this instrument comes from a very surprising source. Every from logo to detectors was designed entirely by college students. This job is to profile the density of dust particles all the way across the solar system. For the first time but the real breakthrough of this instrument, it is the first time that students have been able to build a flight quality instrument on their own and fly it on a mission to a planet.

The final instrument has 12 of these dust detectors, all lined up on a panel about 0.1 meters square. Till now no dust counter has gotten data further out than 18 times the distance of the earth from the sun.  Design specs from the SDC are twice that and lasting decades traveling billions of miles surviving temperatures near absolute zero. Even though it is a student project. The dust counter is every bit as robust and serious as the other instruments on board. The students face the review boards of veteran scientists and engineers of the design process together. The seven science instruments are the powerful set of detectors. ever sent on the first flyby of any world in our solar system. But making sure the Pluto flyby is successful meant a race against time to launch.