Overview
The Ralph Instrument
NASA’s New Horizons mission shed light on some of the most distant worlds in our solar system. Over nearly 10 years, the New Horizons spacecraft traveled more than three billion miles to come within 12,500 km (7,400 miles) of Pluto on July 14, 2015.
At a speed of 14.7 km/sec (31,000 miles per hour), New Horizons is the first and fastest spacecraft to travel such a great distance to study Pluto, a dwarf planet with a complex system of moons never before seen up-close. Flying aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, our Ralph instrument served as the “eyes” of the mission during NASA’s historic rendezvous with Pluto.
Click this link to learn more about the New Horizons mission on the NASA website.
Southwest Research Institute New Horizons
Click here to learn more about the New Horizons mission on the SwRI website.
What We Did
We built the Ralph instrument, a core member of the seven instruments aboard New Horizons, in cooperation with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Ralph includes the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) and the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA), provided by NASA/Goddard.
Ralph’s suite of detectors is fed by a three-mirror telescope with a resolution 10 times higher than the human eye. Small but powerful, Ralph weighs only 23 pounds and uses only about seven watts, the power of a standard night light.
With a resolution as high as 250 meters (800 feet) per pixel, Ralph provided color and black-and-white maps of Pluto’s surface and temperature and mapped the presence of nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, water and other materials across the surfaces of Pluto and its moons. Ralph also provided navigation images that were critical to achieving a precise flyby.