Grand Tour

摘要

Traveling out to the farthest reaches of the solar system, to pluto and the Kuiper belt where it will arrive in 2015, the New Horizons probe has to endure a long and mostly uneventful journey. But luckily there are some spectacular sights along the way. On 28 February 2007, New Horizons flew past Jupiter, where it used the gas giant's gravity to slingshot it to even greater speeds and also test its instruments in flight. New Horizons' transit took it to unvisited areas of the planet's spacescape. The papers in this special issue record how the probe witnessed lightning and aurorae in Jupiter's atmosphere, volcanic eruptions on the moon Io, and the pulsing of Jupiter's magnetosphere, a cocoon of charged particles that swathes the entire system.