SPACE — The American Space Agency (NASA) has decided to extend the time of the New Horizons spacecraft mission in the Kuiper Belt. In this extended mission, New Horizons will search for objects to orbit and study.
New Horizons was originally sent to study Pluto. After that mission was completed, New Horizons’ task was extended to study the Kuiper Belt.
However, NASA had planned to move New Horizons from the Planetary Science Division to the Heliophysics Division, where NASA would focus all its efforts on studying the Sun.
The people behind the mission are against this. The team wants to continue their studies in the Kuiper Belt. The team of scientists opposed the proposal to move the mission. And now, NASA announced the extension of the New Horizons mission in the Kuiper Belt until the end of the 2020s.
“After senior review and input from diverse stakeholders, NASA will continue to focus the NASA New Horizons mission on multidisciplinary science,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for science at NASA, shared in a post on X.
Reporting from BGR, the New Horizons mission is expected to continue missions in the Kuiper Belt while studying and collecting heliophysical data. Heliophysics is the study of the Sun and how it interacts with its surrounding environment. Several NASA spacecraft, including the Parker Solar Probe, have been dedicated to this particular field of study.
New Horizons was launched in 2006. It took nearly 15 years to reach its orbit at the farthest point of our solar system. New Horizons was the first probe to successfully photograph the dwarf planet Pluto up close. After research on Pluto was deemed sufficient, New Horizons continued its journey to the Kuiper Belt.
Today, New Horizons is approximately 50 times farther than Earth from the Sun. New Horizons has spent the last several years studying objects within the Kuiper Belt.
The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut-shaped ring of icy objects that most likely consists of comets and asteroids. The Kuiper Belt stretches behind Neptune’s orbit.
NASA proposed expanding the New Horizons mission to serve as a planetary mission until 2024, and then swapping it for heliophysics studies in 2025. However, the science community united to reject the proposal, so the New Horizons mission in the Kuiper Belt continued.
2023-10-04 03:22:00
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