In 1992, the first object of the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto
was found using a University of Hawaii telescope, confirming there are
bodies beyond the eight planets in orbit within the solar system.
This discovery boosted the unexplored territory of the Kuiper Belt to
the top of the space exploration to-do list, said Alan Stern, New
Horizons principal investigator.
Stern spoke at the Aerospace Division of the American Society of
Civil Engineers (ASCE) Earth & Space conference in Orlando this week
discussing the spacecraft's next mission and data still to come from
the Pluto flyby last July.
The new mission is on target for a Jan. 1, 2019, flyby of
Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69, but that is one of many, said Stern. New
Horizons spacecraft could visit 20 different Kuiper Belt Objects. The
spacecraft is currently healthy and has enough power for 20 years, he
added.
On Wednesday, while Stern was speaking at the ASCE
conference, which was hosted by Missouri University of Science and
Technology, the final proposal for the Kuiper Belt Object mission was
being submitted, he said.
Not exploring the massive Kuiper Belt would be like leaving out the Pacific Ocean on a map of Earth, said Stern.
According to NASA, Kuiper Belt Objects or KBOs are what
remain of the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
"(These) objects that have essentially been left untouched
since the solar system formed," said Daniel Batcheldor, head of the
Physics and Space Sciences at Florida Institute of Technology in
Melbourne.
While Pluto is the best known Kuiper Belt Object, it's on
the edge of the belt that runs around the planets in our solar system
beyond Neptune. Think of KBOs as possible planets, small moons and
comets, but in the thousands.
Focusing in on the comets, University of Central Florida
professor of physics Dan Britt was selected for New Horizons' science
team to study the geology and structure of the 4 billion-year-old
undisturbed frozen objects during the spacecraft's next mission.
"It's really, in planetary science, one of the great
frontiers and it's not like this doesn't interact with Earth and us as
humans," Britt said of the Kuiper Belt.
Every now and again one of the comets from the Kuiper Belt gets loose and whacks planet Earth, he explained.
If the scientific bonanza of discoveries on Pluto was
illuminating, the next phase of New Horizons' journey into the Kuiper
Belt will shed even more light on the mysterious frozen world.
Batcheldor says that KBO 2014 MU69, being much farther beyond Pluto, will be a better representative of the Kuiper Belt.
Meanwhile, the astronomy community is far from done learning from the historic Pluto flyby.
Even before last July's visit, the discoveries about Pluto
and its moons had amazed the science community and public alike with the
imagery that came from the baby grand-sized spacecraft, but the data
from the New Horizons flyby is still only about halfway done downloading
to Earth.
The rest is expected to be down by October.
Pluto just the beginning for New Horizons Kuiper Belt journey
Reviewed by Bizpodia
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