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Message:: [QUOTE="Skyman, post: 1164907, member: 28299"]Spacecraft that travel out to Jupiter or further out than that have electronic systems that are nuclear powered as solar power at that distance from the sun is minimal.  As you might imagine, rocket launches with plutonium on board tend to be political hot potatoes.  First the Federal government has to OK it, then Florida has to approve it.  "New Horizons" is a nuclear powered spacecraft that was launched in 2005.  It will not reach it's destination until 2015.  Anybody want to guess where it is going?  The answer is Pluto, the last planet (well, officially it is now no longer a planet) in the solar system to be imaged by a spacecraft "flyby", and then off into the Kuiper belt (basically the birthplace of comets).  After flying by Pluto and its moon Charon in 2015 and then encountering Kuiper belt objects between 2016 and 2020, New Horizons will become only the fifth probe to leave the solar system. New Horizons is the fastest object Man has ever created.  To put things in perspective, when Apollo sent men to the Moon it took 3 days to go from the Earth to the Moon.  New Horizons covered that distance in 9 hours. From the collectSPACE Website... "New Horizons was a nuclear launch," explained Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons' Principal Investigator, of his probe's plutonium-powered battery. "Those are rare. There are a lot of preparations for safety's sake but they also require all major stakeholders being briefed and in agreement we are ready to go." "After the federal government had given its approval, the state of Florida had to give its approval, so then-Kennedy Space Center director, whose name is Jim Kennedy, and I drove up to Tallahassee one day to see Governor Bush, who was then-governor," recalled Stern of his road trip on November 22, 2005. "On the way to see the governor -- it was a long drive, I think it may have been three to four hundred miles -- we got to talking about what we might do to get him a little more personally interested in the mission, other than just invite him to the launch," said Stern. "We came upon the thought, why don't we fly a state quarter of Florida?" "Toward the end of the briefing, I mentioned to [Governor Bush] that we really wanted to fly a Florida state quarter but couldn't come up with one and it was due to our poor planning because we had only thought of it today," Stern recounted. "And he said, 'Well, I've got plenty!'" and with that ran out of the room and when he came back, he had a roll of the quarters. "He said, 'Fly these!'" Stern accepted the roll from the governor, but explained he could only fly one. The others would be distributed to team members as a souvenir of the mission. Less you think however, that the quarter flew simply as a gesture to the governor, it served a bonafide purpose on the spacecraft. "For spin balance, we need to add a number of kilograms to various places [on New Horizons]," explained Stern. "We knew this was the case because the moments of inertia of the spacecraft and the dynamical properties of it, that we would have to trim it out down to literally the grams-level with balance weights. Of course, we had a whole variety of big ones and little ones; you start off with adding a kilogram here and a kilogram there and you end up getting smaller and smaller weights in various places until you're done. We used the coins to that purpose," he said. "Since we needed a counter balance to [the Florida state quarter], we decided to fly a second state quarter. We picked Maryland because that is where the spacecraft was built. And because we had so many people back in Maryland at the Applied Physics Lab and at Goddard, it was easy for someone to ship us a quarter really quick." Here's a picture of the FL. quarter all dressed up and ready to go... <img src="http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m246/SkyMan58/SpaceRelated/PlutoFL25c.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]

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