After traveling the 3 billion miles, after surviving the radioactive environment of space for 9 years, after carrying the ashes of the astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet, Clyde Tombaugh to his Pluto, the piano-sized probe New Horizons will be constantly transmitting data from its flyby for those of us to ogle and study. The information contained in New Horizons’ transmissions are categorized as low, medium and high priority. New Horizons officials say its final transmission will be in October or November of next year.
NEW HORIZONS EXIST BEYOND PLUTO
The probe was not sent out for the sole purpose of exploring the Plutonian system (i.e. Pluto and its moons). New Horizons loses several watts of power every year, but it still has enough power remaining to function for 20 additional years, and there’s plenty else to see in the outer reaches of our solar system.
TO THE KUIPER BELT
For starters, the spacecraft will penetrate even farther into the Kuiper Belt, a spheroid assemblage of asteroids encapsulating the entire solar system. The largest phenomenon in our system, the Kuiper Belt is host to over 100,000 miniature worlds we’ve never been to before.
Once beyond the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons will follow the voyage of Voyager 1 & 2, a pair of twin, tank-sized probes that gave us our first tour of the outer planets in the seventies and early eighties. Now New Horizons can also move into its mission’s final phase, “to explore the dep reaches of the heliosphere,” said principal investigator Alan Stern. He continues: “Eventually, we’ll get to a point where we can’t operate the primary spacecraft computer and the communications system. We’ve estimated that that point will be reached sometime in the mid 2030s, roughly 20 years from now…[o]ver those next 20 years, if a spacecraft continues to be healthy, it could operate and return scientific data.”
AND BEYOND
If the probe’s “health” is maintained, then perhaps it, like the Voyager probes, could be among the first human artifacts to leave our solar system, and enter the interstellar frontier, where it will eventually go cold, and enter a deep slumber as it drifts for an eternity.
