American probe performs historic mission on New Year

An American spacecraft is about to fly in the coming days with an ultimatum to the far reaches of the solar system, at a great distance from the ground, where human beings have never been the object of a near crime.

It is located between 6 and 400 million kilometers from the Earth and the probe will cover 3,500 kilometers of its surface, three times closer to the dwarf Planet Pluto in 2015.

Ultima Tulle lies 600 million kilometers from Pluto, in the so-called Kuiper belt, on the edge of the solar system.

This is "the most primitive" of all the objects that human probes have already encountered, according to John Weakens, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Scientists do not know its exact size, but it will probably be 100 times smaller than the Pluto dwarf planet, 2400 km. He is swimming in space in an area where the temperature drops below zero; it is therefore likely that the material is preserved there as it was when it was formed.

"These are the effects of the solar system," Hall Weaver says. And Ultima Toll of the Kuiper Belt, a vast disk of small objects orbiting the sun that have remained since the formation of the solar system. This belt discovered the 1990s, located on 4 billion and 800 million kilometers of sun, above the orbit of Neptune, the planet furthest away from the sun.

The belt contains billions of comets and millions of objects, such as ultima tulle, planets called planetary disks that will later form planets, according to Allen Stern, an officer of New Horizons.

"This distant region retains the conditions of four billion and 500 million years ago, so getting closer to Ultima will show us how things started," he said.

NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft in 2006, swimming in space at 51,000 km / h and at such a speed that its impact on a small crime such as a grain of rice could fragment it instantly. If the mission takes place near Oltima in peace, the spacecraft will send hundreds of images to Earth, which has already sent breathtaking photos to Pluto in 2015, but this time the images will be three times more clear than Pluto's, according to Stern.