In the News
Published January 20, 2006
The Arizona Republic
Valley Firm Steers Pluto Ship
Thursday's launch of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto was being monitored extra closely by a small company in Tempe called KinetX, Inc.
In fact, the company will be watching the mission closely for the next nine-plus years
as the spacecraft makes the 3 billion-mile journey to the outer reaches of the solar system.
KinetX is responsible for navigating the spacecraft and operating its camera once it
arrives at Pluto sometime in 2015. A team from the company is based at the Applied Physics
Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which is running the mission for NASA.
"We're pretty excited," KinetX President and CEO Michael Fisher said after Thursday's
successful launch. Fisher said his company would gather all the data and parameters the
spacecraft would need to make the journey. The 1,054-pound spacecraft, the size of a
concert grand piano, will photograph the surfaces of Pluto and its moon, Charon, and also
will study the frozen, sunless reaches of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt.
KinetX, founded in 1992 by a group of Lockheed engineers, also is navigating a spacecraft
bound for Mercury to orbit and photograph that planet.
"We are very happy because we've got two spacecraft we are navigating, and we hope to
get more missions," Fisher said.