[ad_1]
Wednesday 02 January
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A spacecraft launched by the US NASA spacecraft on Tuesday morning reached the other end of the solar system and will fly near a 30-kilometer-long space rock traveling billions of kilometers a mission to collect information on the origin of the solar system. .
Once the probe enters the outer layer of the belt containing frozen objects and debris to form the solar system, it will for the first time examine the Altima Thuli, a large block in the form of a peanut bean.
NASA said the scientists had not discovered Altima Thuli during the launch of the probe, which made her mission unique. In 2014, astronomers monitored Altima Thule with the help of Hubble Space Telescope and chose to be part of the New Horizons mission started in 2015.
"Everything is possible in this very unknown region," John Spencer, a New Horizons scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, told reporters.
The New Horizons were launched in January 2006 to reduce the ice of the solar system by four billion kilometers and to study Pluto and its five moons.
Approaching Pluto in 2015, the probe discovered that Pluto was slightly larger than expected. In March, dunes rich in methane were discovered on the surface of Pluto.
The probe has been cut one billion kilometers behind Pluto towards the Kuiper belt and is now seeking information on the origin of the solar system and its planets.
The probe will fly 3,500 kilometers from the surface of the Altima Thole mass and scientists hope to know the chemical composition of their atmosphere and their terrain during a mission. NASA says it will be the closest surveillance of a body in this extreme dimension of the Earth.
Although the New Horizons mission represents the closest approach to an object of this size in our solar system, two Voyager II and Floyd II probes launched by NASA in 1977 to explore the space far are even more likely to study objects outside the group. And their mission is not over yet.
Reuters
Source link
