NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling out of the photo voltaic system at an unimaginable velocity. It’s presently about 8 billion kilometres from the solar, and by the point you end studying this story, it should have sped 1000’s of kilometres additional into the frigid gloom. It’s lonely on the market. Even the enormous planet Jupiter is however a tiny speck.
New Horizons is principally recognized for giving us our first correct take a look at 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.”
Nevertheless, the dream isn’t over but as a result of New Horizons could also be poised for a shock ultimate act. In early 2024, one among its detectors recorded an surprising uptick within the quantity of mud it was encountering. Since that materials may have been created in collisions between rock fragments, astronomers now marvel if there are numerous objects past the rubble-strewn Kuiper belt usually thought-about the sting of the photo voltaic system. If that’s the case, our system’s boundaries will must be redrawn and our fashions of the way it fashioned thrown into doubt.
Stern and his colleagues are clearly eager to benefit from their probe’s distinctive place to study extra about this unexplored wilderness whereas they nonetheless can. “It’s an…
