NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been returning some exciting data, after a long flight through the solar system:
This documentary provides illuminating background on the mission: The Year of Pluto.
It is much to be hoped that the New Horizons craft will be able to observe other Kuiper belt objects.
Author: Milan
In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford.
Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.
View all posts by Milan
NASA engineers managed to get the tiny probe — about the size and shape of a grand piano — to an incredibly precise spot in space, using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot to accelerate it outward and a few thruster burns over the years to keep the probe on track.
New Horizons has a new possible destination after its historic Pluto flyby this past summer. A small Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69, almost a billion miles past Pluto.
Scientist have been searching for a viable flyby object since 2011 using ground-based telescopes, but the Hubble Space Telescope was the key to finding five options within New Horizons’ flight path. The Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 was later identified as one of two objects New Horizons can reach with its remaining fuel. The spacecraft is designed to last for many years past its flyby date.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/go-for-launch/os-new-horizons-next-mission-after-pluto-20150829-post.html
“2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.”
Eventually, their labors paid off. On Dec. 22, the Department of Energy announced that researchers at Oak Ridge had managed to produce 50 grams of plutonium-238 — a feat that hasn’t been performed since production was halted at Savannah River.
It’s a big step forward for future space missions. Currently, there are only about 35 kilograms (or around 77 pounds) of stored plutonium-238 left, and only half of that is immediately usable. As the fuel ages, it cools off and becomes less useful — but Onuschak said that old fuel can be mixed with new fuel as it’s produced to extend the substance’s life.
What’s available now will still be enough to get NASA through its next planned Mars mission — the Mars 2020 rover — but if NASA wants to continue sending missions like New Horizons into deep space, it will need new stores of fuel in the future.
Researchers at Oak Ridge plan to collaborate with facilities at Idaho National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory to begin scaling up production, Wham said. By the end of the decade, they’re hoping to be producing several hundred grams of fuel per year — and by the early 2020s, they hope to be up to a kilogram and a half.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/30/this-is-the-fuel-nasa-needs-to-make-it-to-the-edge-of-the-solar-system-and-beyond/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-technology%3Ahomepage%2Fcard
New Horizons Returns Last Bits of 2015 Flyby Data to Earth
NASA’s New Horizons mission reached a major milestone this week when the last bits of science data from the Pluto flyby – stored on the spacecraft’s digital recorders since July 2015 – arrived safely on Earth.
New Horizons Returns Last Bits of 2015 Flyby Data to Earth
NASA’s New Horizons mission reached a major milestone this week when the last bits of science data from the Pluto flyby – stored on the spacecraft’s digital recorders since July 2015 – arrived safely on Earth.
Chasing Shadows for a Glimpse of a Tiny World Beyond Pluto
…
Neptune known as the Kuiper belt, this object with the designation 2014 MU69 is among the smallest. It orbits more than four billion miles from the sun, and it is like a time capsule, promising clues about how the planets formed.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope first spied it three years ago as they searched for somewhere for New Horizons to visit after Pluto.
All Hubble could see was a slowly moving speck of light — enough to calculate an orbit and determine that New Horizons could reach it. But almost everything else about MU69 was a mystery or a guess. Not even the largest, most powerful telescopes on Earth can see it at all.
The New Horizons scientists could, however, learn more about it during a few chance moments when a star in the night sky momentarily vanished because MU69 passed in front of it.
Two years on, the Kuiper Belt is in sight
New Horizons will reach its next destination on New Year’s Day, 2019
Pluto’s equator is covered in skyscraper-sized methane ice blades
Help Nickname New Horizons’ Next Flyby Target
NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is looking for your ideas on what to informally name its next flyby destination, a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) past Pluto.
‘Not just a space potato’: Nasa unveils ‘astonishing’ details of most distant object ever visited
It’s red, it’s cold, it’s 4bn years old: Nasa data from Arrokoth reveals ‘profound truths’ about the solar system
“For decades, scientists have wrestled with two competing scenarios for how planetary formation kicked off. In the first, known as hierarchical accretion, small grains and pebbles zipped around occasionally bashing into each other with enough force to stick, making bigger and bigger objects. Gradually, over millions of years, planets accumulated matter though random, forceful collisions.
Under a second scenario, known as cloud collapse, certain regions of the nebula had a higher density of particles and these clumps were drawn towards each other, until they spontaneously gravitationally collapsed. Collisions were gentle and the planets were “born big”, with objects tens or hundreds of miles in diameter emerging within hundreds of years.
Arrokoth’s appearance and composition provide compelling evidence in support of the cloud collapse theory. “The imagery shows no signs of violence, no fractures, the two lobes don’t looks smashed together,” said Stern, who is based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Everything about Arrokoth, he said, points towards a gentle coalescence. The object’s two lobes are also uniform in colour and composition, both having ultra-red surfaces containing organic compounds, which implies the fragments were orbiting nearby each other, rather than coming from disparate parts of the nebula. The findings, along with other details of Arrokoth’s appearance and composition, appear in three papers in the journal Science.”
Pluto’s peaks are ice volcanoes, scientists conclude | Pluto | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/29/plutos-peaks-are-ice-volcanoes-scientists-conclude