NASA has just declared that their New Horizons probe is ready to set course toward the Kuiper Belt; specifically the object MU69. If its mission extension is approved by the agency, the probe will be headed to where no probe has gone before, over a billion miles beyond Pluto.
The final checkpoint before the probe is cleared for the mission has just been passed over, and operators at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has received full proof that the probe is ready. It is now only a matter of getting the yay or nay from NASA. This is another successful milestone that the New Horizons has overcome, and every day, the agency receives ton of new and exciting data about the edge of the expanse of space that we know. This extended mission will show us things beyond our knowledge, and it is an exciting notion to everyone involved. The decision is expected to be made early next year.
Meanwhile, the New Horizons is set to get as close to Pluto as it’s ever been to provide us with more information on the distant planet. The probe now speeds at 51,500 kph and orbits about 5.1 billion kilometers from Earth, and about a billion and a half kilometers away from its next target, if approved. All of the probe’s systems remain healthy, and data is transferred back to Houston on the daily.
