Work that researchers have done at Idaho National Laboratory in recent years is — quite literally — out of this world.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which has travelled 3 billion miles in the last nine-plus years and is now closing in on Pluto and its moons, is powered by a “space battery” built at the INL, according to officials there.

“I think it’s important everyone realize that NASA missions going to planets are armed with power systems made in Eastern Idaho. I don’t know that everybody knows that and I think that’s kind of neat,” said Stephen Johnson, director of the INL Space Nuclear Power & Isotope Technologies Division.

Nearly 80 technicians, engineers, quality assurance and health physics professionals, technical writers, trainers, mechanics, electricians, and facility and project managers worked together to assemble, test and prepare the “space battery” — a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) — for launch in 2006, according to INL officials. And they had a lot of work to do before they could even begin.

Johnson said they took over several facilities in Ohio as they were preparing for the mission and they had 300 tons of equipment that they needed to bring to Idaho. They also had to build the 10,000-square-foot Space and Security Power Systems Facility at the INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex, west of Idaho Falls, which houses the specialized glove boxes they use to assemble objects and the equipment they use to test them for their missions, and build up their staff within a short time frame.

There was some talk of delaying the mission, but Johnson said it would have caused a considerable setback

“If we had missed this launch window in January 2006, we were going to miss the gravitational slingshot around one of the larger planets and we going to take an additional five years to get there,” he said. “That was highly undesirable so we made the first launch window as we were supposed to do.”

Even with the 2006 launch, it’s taken more than nine years for New Horizons to get this far and it’s still 4.6 million miles from Pluto.

Luckily, the INL’s “space battery” can handle that kind of distance.

“The RTG power system uses the heat from the natural decay of plutonium-238 to provide an uninterrupted and reliable source of electricity and heat for the New Horizons probe in the remote and harsh environment of deep space,” according to a news release, which adds that the generator is providing about 202 watts of electrical power for the spacecraft’s operations and seven science instruments.

Johnson said plutonium-238 is the best choice because it is stable, durable, can put out heat for more than a decade and is relatively affordable. All of that’s important when it comes to powering spacecrafts.

“We need something that will work for a reasonable period of time and this mission is a 10-year mission just to get there, and they want to steer it out past Pluto into the Kuiper belt,” he said.

The New Horizons mission should offer an up-close look at Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, and provide information about their surfaces, atmospheres, interiors and space environments, according to its mission overview.

The spacecraft is expected to make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, and will eventually continue on to the Kuiper belt, which INL officials say contains icy objects and remnants from the formation of the solar system dating back more than 4 billion years ago.

“Owing to their fundamental relationship to understanding our solar system’s origin and evolution, a Kuiper belt-Pluto flyby was the top priority in the National Research Council’s Decadal Survey of Solar System Exploration,” according to the mission overview.

Johnson will represent the INL at a celebration at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on July 14, and is looking forward to seeing some of the friends he worked with nearly a decade ago as they were preparing for the launch. He said they are arranging for a communication from the probe — a sort of “E.T. phone home scenario,” he said.

“I’m looking forward to that,” he said.

INL officials say the spacecraft is already providing information about the surface features on Pluto and Charon.

“Not many people have to wait 10 years for the payoff of their hard work, but it is enormously gratifying to see the close-up imagery being beamed back,” Johnson said in the news release. “We still have many members of our team that supported the 2006 launch working here in Idaho, and the excitement about the news discoveries is really starting to build.”