The New Horizons spacecraft was designed to study the planet Pluto, but its instruments are now being used for other purposes. The New Horizons team is working hard to enhance the spacecraft’s capabilities and carry out new missions.
Distance from the Sun and Ongoing Research
The New Horizons spacecraft is now nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, and the outer planets are moving swiftly, illuminating the interstellar space thanks to the massive belt of the Milky Way galaxy. However, the spacecraft’s scientific research is not yet complete. All of its instruments are functioning well and responsive, and the New Horizons team is diligently working to develop the spacecraft’s capabilities and execute new missions.
Budget and Power
As the New Horizons spacecraft moves farther from the Sun, directing the spacecraft requires patience and focused coordination. Engineers begin building the command load three months in advance and then run it on a simulator at the Applied Physics Laboratory to validate it. Sending commands takes eight hours to reach the spacecraft from Earth and requires booking a slot in NASA’s Deep Space Network – which consists of three massive radio dishes located in California, Australia, and Spain that handle communications for multiple space missions. Therefore, like reserving a table at a popular restaurant, booking requires months in advance unless there is an emergency.
The New Horizons spacecraft rotates as it races through space, and while some instruments (like particle detectors) work better in a spinning mode, the spacecraft needs to be non-rotating and aimed to use its cameras, which consumes precious fuel. The spacecraft is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which is a nuclear battery made from plutonium-238, with a half-life of 87.7 years. The duration of this power supply is currently unknown.
Exploring the Deep Kuiper Belt
One of the spacecraft’s missions is to explore the Kuiper Belt, which extends from Neptune’s orbit at 30 astronomical units to beyond 50 astronomical units from the Sun. The belt consists of rocky and icy fragments, asteroids, and dust. Since leaving Pluto, the largest body in the Kuiper Belt, the geology team has begun using the spacecraft’s capabilities to study other asteroids, and they have discovered more than 100 new asteroids so far, getting close to about 20 asteroids enough to reveal surface characteristics, shapes, rotation periods, and nearby moons.
The Kuiper Belt holds the key to a major mystery. Why did all the planets coalesce from dust and gas clouds between the stars instead of mutually colliding and destroying each other? Asteroids experience deformation and reformation due to multiple collisions and do not retain the signatures of their formation. So when the geology team learned that the spacecraft would pass by a large body in the Kuiper Belt, they were very excited.
When the spacecraft passed by the Arrokoth binary body, which was remotely contacted at a distance of 3,500 kilometers (2,198 miles) in 2019, the images returned by New Horizons appeared to the untrained eye to be an unremarkable potato. However, its unique location in the outer Kuiper Belt preserved Arrokoth’s integrity, which is a remnant from the days of the solar system’s formation. Analysis of the detailed data obtained by New Horizons from this 36-kilometer-long (22 miles) and 20-kilometer-wide (13 miles) body shows that the larger component was assembled from 8 to 10 smaller constituents, all of which were moving very slowly to “dock.” According to Will Grundy, head of the planetary geology team at the Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was discovered in 1930: “If they had merged more quickly, their outer features would have been distorted by the collision.”
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