SCRATCH-BUILDING A ‘NEW HORIZONS’ PLUTO PROBE TO 1:8 SCALE
IT TOOK NEARLY TEN YEARS and a journey of three billion miles, but the space probe New Horizons finally flew close by the sub-zero world of Pluto on July 14, 2015. And here is Mat Irvine’s account of scratch-building a 1:8 scale model of the probe for a BBC TV show. Mat Irvine: Models of space probes within the space industry are relatively plentiful, as they are often needed for design and engineering purposes, and even for CEOs’ desktops. But when it comes to commercial kits, they are the poor relation, compared to models of launch rockets and manned spacecraft. Consequently, when I needed to supply a New Horizons model for the BBC2 series Stargazing Live in March 2015, there was no other way but to build it from scratch. Having said that, there is a paper model available from NASA here . The NASA link also gives downloadable models of Pluto and the Pluto-Charon twin-body system. There are 3D model files available too, which are also available direct here . However,...