NASA’s New Horizon mission, which carried out the first ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015, has been granted an extension for further probe of the Kuiper Belt.
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Although New Horizons has received the go-ahead to venture, the Dawn spacecraft – which now orbits the dwarf planets Ceres – will remain at it’s current location rather than proceeding to the Adeona asteroid.
“We’re excited to continue onward into the dark depths of the outer solar system to a science target that wasn’t even discovered when the spacecraft launched in 2006”, said Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science. The spacecraft is now set for a January 1, 2019 flyby of a small object called 2014 MU69, which lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto in the dark and frigid Kuiper Belt.
Onwards and outwards. Following its spectacular fly-by of Pluto last July, the New Horizons spacecraft is now officially headed for one final job before its fuel runs out. According to Engadget, objects in this region, like the MU69, are very much like pieces that made up the solar system’s dwarf planet when it came together billions of years ago. New Horizons is now healthy and has enough power for 20 years after its historic flyby of Pluto, he added. The undisturbed, four million year old object is believed to be the most pristine ever to be visited by a spacecraft, according to principle investigator Alan Stern.
On Friday, NASA announced that it has approved New Horizons’ next mission, and that the probe has received extra funding to continue its exploration of the Kuiper Belt.
These decisions were based on a report by the 2016 Planetary Mission Senior Review Panel, NASA officials said. Once New Horizons reaches within 2000 miles of MU69, it would throw up entirely different picture of the universe.
The spacecraft is off to an object deep in the Kuiper Belt known as 2014 MU69.
It orbits the Sun once every 293 years from about 4.1 billion miles out, about half a billion miles further out than Pluto.
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Those missions include Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Atmsphere and Volatile Evolution (a.k.a. MAVEN), the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers on Mars, the Mars Odyssey orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the NASA contribution to the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission. The unexpected orbit period makes it a cold classical Kuiper belt object which may not have undergone significant perturbations, said studies.
