New Horizons Space Probe and Stand by ottaross

Last crawled date: 4 years ago

Pluto's best friend, it's the famous NewHorizons space probe. The latest in my series of 3Dprinter-ready spacecraft. Now out beyond Pluto's orbit, aiming for a Kuiper Belt object named 2014 MU69 in January 2019.
Print your own personal craft now, and you can follow along for the next phase of its adventure the Dec31, 2018 Flyby of Ultima Thule, an object way out beyond Pluto in the Kuiper belt.
As with most space probes, there are many things sticking out in various directions, making them hard to 3Dprint. By splitting the body up the centre, it gets a bit easier to build on your printer bed. You simply need to affix the two halves together to get the final result. A couple of pegs help with the aignment.
My design goal is generally 'printable without supports' as they can make the supported surface rather rough (on my printer at least). If you have a better printer, you may get nice pristine results with judicious adding of supports for the odd sticky-outy bits. The high gain antenna dish is a bit tricky to build without supports, and I didn't want to split it into halves. So I did use supports there (concentric ones are good), I just used them below the object (to build plate only) and the resulting roughness stays mostly out-of-view.
The two assembly pegs and the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) parts print as a group.
See some of my other models here on Thingiverse - like the OSIRIS-REx, Cassini (with removable Huygens probe) and the ever-popular Sputnik on a Stand.
UPDATE A slightly more elaborate (& more accurate) version of the dish was added (v3a).