NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling out of the photo voltaic system at an unimaginable velocity. It’s at present about 8 billion kilometres from the solar, and by the point you end studying this story, it’ll have sped 1000’s of kilometres additional into the frigid gloom. It’s lonely on the market. Even the large planet Jupiter is however a tiny speck.
New Horizons is principally recognized for giving us our first correct look on the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015. Till then, we had solely seen it as a blurry smudge. It has additionally taught us a lot in regards to the photo voltaic system’s outer reaches and the small, frozen worlds that float there. “It’s really been an Alice in Wonderland kind of story,” says Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the mission. “It’s been dreamlike and we’ve discovered wonderful things.”
Nonetheless, the dream isn’t over but as a result of New Horizons could also be poised for a shock last act. In early 2024, one in all its detectors recorded an surprising uptick within the quantity of mud it was encountering. Since that materials might have been created in collisions between rock fragments, astronomers now surprise if there are lots of objects past the rubble-strewn Kuiper belt typically thought-about the sting of the photo voltaic system. In that case, our system’s boundaries will have to be redrawn and our fashions of the way it shaped thrown into doubt.
Stern and his colleagues are clearly eager to benefit from their probe’s distinctive place to be taught extra about this unexplored wilderness whereas they nonetheless can. “It’s an…
