The technology of New Horizons

The 7 instruments plus antenna

In my last post I wrote about New Horizons, the NASA space probe sent to fly past Pluto by this coming July. Articles written about the mission are interesting texts for all kinds of engineering students, and information about the instruments selected for the mission are particularly useful - not only for the specific technical information - but also for examples of technical description that students can focus on for their own writing.

A good source of material for technical descriptions is the New Horizons website, in the section on Spacecraft, Overview:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/overview.php

where there is a brief description of each of the 7 instruments chosen for the mission. In the sub-section Science Payload each instrument is described in more detail:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/sciencePay.php

Each description is fairly short, but clearly describes the instrument's objectives, what it looks like, and how it works. Therefore, there is a lot of useful language for technical description. In addition to the specific vocabulary of each instrument, there are useful verb-preposition and verb-noun collocations that indicate what something "does." These verbs can be used to describe other types of technology as well.

For example:

• meet a goal
• ejected from
• interact with
• provide backup to
• collect and focus the light
• operates at (visible) wavelengths
• produce color maps
• tailored to measure
• distribution over the surface
• pass from ... through
• focused onto
• acts like a
• emit / absorb light
• reveal new constituents
• probe the atmospheric composition
• separate light into
• produce an image of
• viewed through
• produce absorption by
• look back at
• point back at
• send radio signals to
• bend the radio waves
• record the radio waves
• send data back to
• measure the weak radio emissions from
• consists of
• derive a (very accurate) value for
• focus visible light onto
• take images of
• determine whether
• become charged by
• count and measure the sizes of
• collide with
• built by
• with supervision from

In writing a description, students will also need to use relative clauses - both restrictive and non-restrictive. This text provides examples of both, and these examples serve to illustrate the difference between them (or whether to use a comma or not).

Restrictive clauses:

• LEISA data may also reveal new constituents on the surfaces that have not yet been detected.
• Alice is an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer that will probe the atmospheric composition of Pluto.
• A "spectrometer" is an instrument that separates light into its constituent wavelengths, ...
• ... the atmosphere bends the radio waves by an amount that depends on ...
• The instrument that provides the highest spatial resolution on New Horizons is ...
• ... aperture that focuses visible light onto a charge-coupled device.
• ... will search for neutral atoms that escape Pluto's atmosphere ...

Non-restrictive clauses:

• MVIC also has two panchromatic filters, which pass essentially all visible light, ...
• Alice has two modes of operation: an "airglow" mode, which allows measurement of ...
• All communication ... takes place through the radio package, which makes it critical to mission success.
• REX also has a "radiometry" mode, which will measure the weak radio emissions from Pluto itself.
• ... LORRI, short for Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, which consists of ...
• The ... is counting and  measuring the sizes of dust particles along New Horizon's entire trajectory, which covers regions of interplanetary space never before sampled.

Finally, there are linking and transition words and phases - useful for all types of writing:

• for example
• not only ... but also
• while
• respectively
• also
• In all cases,
• acts like a
• so that
• since
• may also
• not yet
• both ... and
• either ... or
• just after
• including
• similar to that described above
• no (filters) or
• another
• subsequently
• such

There is a lot of material here for researching information, discussions, language work, presentations and follow-up work throughout the semester.