BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy New Horizons wakes up

NASA's mission to the Kuiper Belt New Horizons has woken up. The spacecraft is on the way to see Pluto and its moon Charon - she's due there next summer. The craft was launched in January 2006 and has traveled a long way since then. There will be some course corrections and calibration and various other chores while New Horizons is awake.

Good news, bad news, hopeful news

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be at its closest to Pluto in July 2015. After It visits Pluto & its moons, NASA wants it to study another KBO. Since the Kuiper Belt is made up of lots of icy remnants from the early Solar System, this should be easy, yes?

No. KBOs are small and dark and far away. That's why the first one wasn't found until 1992. (Of course, Pluto had been discovered before that, but no one realized there was such a thing as a KBO then.) So actually finding another target for New Horizons hasn't been easy. In fact, they haven't found one.

However, good news from the Hubble Space Telescope Time Allocation Committee. A few days ago it recommended using the space telescope to carry out a preliminary search of the area of sky to which the spacecraft is headed.

Yesterday (August 25) was the 25th anniversary of Voyager 2's fly-by of Neptune. It's still the only mission to visit the ice giant. Much of what we know about Neptune, its giant moon Triton and the rest of its moons, is what the Voyager mission discovered.

Yesterday was also the day on which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft crossed Neptune's orbit on its way to Pluto. (It's due there next summer.) Many astronomers think that Neptune's moon Triton may be a captured Kuiper Belt object and a close relative of Pluto. But Neptune was a few billion miles away in another part of its orbit, so New Horizons didn't take any family snaps yesterday.