NEW HORIZONS SPACECRAFT HAS A NEW TARGET!
After its historic flyby of Pluto, NASA scientists have finally chosen where New Horizons is headed next. Named 2014 MU69, and it was one of two objects resembling a comet presently under consideration for the mission. The agency will put the plans under review before officially giving a green light on the extension of the mission, which has so far captured very thorough images and data of not only the dwarf planet (coming as close as 7,767 miles from it) on July 14th, but also of its moons Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. It has brought forth details that will revolutionize many sciences, revealed the dwarf planet’s face at a distance shorter than ever before, limning the characteristics of its landscapes and that of its moons.
WHERE EXACTLY IS THE NEW HORIZONS HEADED?
2014 MU69 is about one billion miles beyond Pluto, and it’s thought to be one of the building blocks that causes dwarf planets such as Pluto to form. 2014 MU69 and its surrounding objects make up a region of our Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, which is a deep-freeze sample of what the cosmic neighborhood looked like when it formed, approximately 4.6 billion years ago. With this knowledge, we may be able to draw more precise conclusions as to our solar system’s past, and we might just be able to infer about its future.
THE FUTURE OF THE NEW HORIZONS SPACECRAFT
John Grunsfield, head of NASA’s Science Mission doctorate, has big plans for the current mission and its future ones. “Even as (…) the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer,” he says in a statement, and adds that they “”expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission, while still providing new and exciting science.”
The head investigator of the mission, Alan Stern, declared that the 2014 MU was a “great choice” for a new trajectory, and that said journey would cost less fuel to reach its destination and would in turn preserve enough to flyby or protect against any unforeseen events. According to NASA, the probe’s power system is designed to operate for many more years and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby. The New Horizons carries enough fuel to operate until and perhaps even beyond 2020, which gives it plenty of time to carry out a few more ground-breaking flybys.
The space probe will undergo a series of engine burns to set its course toward 2014 MU69 in late October and early November, and its arrival date at 2014 MU69 is currently set for January 1st, 2019.
