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 Continuous Research
The New Horizons spacecraft is now nearly twice the distance from Pluto to the Sun, moving through the outer planets at a high speed, illuminating the interstellar space through the Milky Way galaxy’s massive belt. However, the spacecraft’s research is not yet complete. All of its instruments are operational and responsive, and the New Horizons team is diligently working to develop the spacecraft’s capabilities and execute new tasks.
Budget and Power
As the New Horizons spacecraft travels further from the Sun, directing it requires patience and a carefully tailored focus. Engineers begin constructing the command load three months in advance and then run it on a simulator at the Applied Physics Laboratory to verify its accuracy. Sending commands takes eight hours to reach the spacecraft from Earth and requires booking a slot in NASA’s deep space network – three massive radio dishes located in California, Australia, and Spain, which handle communications with multiple space missions. Therefore, similar to reserving a table at a popular restaurant, booking requires months in advance unless there is an emergency.
The New Horizons spacecraft spins as it races through space, and while some instruments (such as particle detectors) function best when in spinning mode, the spacecraft must stop and target using precious fuel for its imagers. Power is supplied by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), a nuclear battery made from plutonium-238, which has a half-life of 87.7 years. Currently, it is unknown how long this power will last.
A New Look at Distant Kuiper Belt Objects
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, icy fragments, asteroids, and dust. Since leaving Pluto, the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, the geology team has begun using the spacecraft’s capabilities to study other Kuiper objects, discovering over 100 new bodies and passing closely by nearly 20 Kuiper objects to uncover surface characteristics, shapes, rotational periods, and nearby moons.
The Kuiper Belt holds the key to a significant mystery. Why did all the planets form from clouds of interstellar dust and gas instead of colliding and destroying each other? Asteroids are affected by multiple collisions and are re-formed, so they cannot retain the traces of their formation. Therefore, when the geology team learned that the spacecraft would pass by a large body in the Kuiper Belt, they became very excited.
When it flew by the dual contact body Arrokoth at a remote distance of 3,500 kilometers (2,198 miles) in 2019, the photos returned by New Horizons looked, to the untrained eye, like an unexciting potato. However, its unique position in the outer Kuiper Belt preserved Arrokoth intact, which is a remnant from the early days of the solar system’s formation. Detailed data analysis obtained by New Horizons of this 36-kilometer-long (22 miles) and up to 20-kilometer-wide (13 miles) body shows that the larger side was assembled from 8 to 10 smaller components, all of which were moving very slowly to be able to “dock.” Will Grundy, head of the planetary geology team at Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was discovered in 1930, said, “If they had merged faster, their outer lines would have been distorted by collision.”
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