In late August, the Department of Space Studies hosted the instrument design reviews for the New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission PERSI remote sensing suite. The design review was conducted by a panel of engineering and instrumentation experts from NASA, industry, and academia.

PERSI's development is a collaboration between SwRI, Ball Aerospace, and NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. PERSI will contain the main imagers and IR and UV mapping spectrometers for the New Horizons mission. PERSI's name honors Percival Lowell, the instigator and sponsor of the search that led to the discovery of Pluto. New Horizons is slated to launch just over 3 years, in January 2006.

PERSI background (Powerpoint file; 2.7 MB)