NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft conducted the first and only flyby of the Pluto system, culminating at the closest approach of that distant world in July 2015.
Sailing onward, the probe carried out a Jan. 1, 2019 flyby of Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt Object, or KBO, located in a region of space beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. There are scads of other icy worlds residing in the Kuiper Belt, celestial leftovers from the formation of our solar system.
For New Horizons, the gathering of more exploration science is, pun intended, on the horizon.
Invaluable observations
Late last year, a study by the U.S. National Academies titled “The Next Decade of Discovery in Solar and Space Physics: Exploring and Safeguarding Humanity’s Home in Space” observed that “key challenges are to keep receiving the invaluable observations from the New Horizons and Voyager spacecraft, which are the only means to gain firsthand knowledge of the environment in the outer heliosphere and outside the heliospheric bubble.”
Related: New Horizons: Exploring Pluto and beyond
That report also noted that “moving outward, the boundary of the solar system where the sun’s influence wanes and is replaced by the interstellar environment, there is much to be discovered.”
The heliospheric decadal report is important for several reasons, said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.”It’s a completely independent validation by the community about how important and unique the New Horizons science is to that field,” he told Space.com.
New Horizons is gearing up to cross the sun’s “termination shock,” Stern said, where the subsonic solar wind slows down and becomes subsonic as it rams into the interstellar medium.
Related: New Horizons Pluto probe notches 3 new discoveries in outer solar system
Guessing game
Though New Horizons is now in hibernation mode, the spacecraft is still collecting heliophysics data around the clock, Stern said,…
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