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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft continues to prove itself. After impressing us with images of the solar system in 2015, the spacecraft, which has been traveling for more than a decade, recently took a picture of its next target, an object in the Kuiper Belt that was sighted months earlier. of the close encounter scheduled for the New Year 2019. According to all the evidence, Ultima Thule is only a fragment of space debris, but scientists hope that there will be many more things than his cool nickname. These first images only fuel this hope.
"The image field is extremely rich in background stars, which makes it difficult to detect weak objects," said Hal Weaver, New Horizons Project Scientist and Senior Scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. in Laurel, Maryland. "It's like finding a needle in a haystack. In these early images, Ultima only appears as a bump on the side of a background star that is about 17 times brighter, but Ultima will become brighter – and easier to see – as the ship space is getting closer.
The ship's long-range reconnaissance (LORRI) imager spotted Ultima Thule's more than 100 million-kilometer belt while using the spacecraft's embedded cameras for the first time in mid-August. This preview of the next target is also the first real look at the Kuiper Belt, which is the last part of the solar system that New Horizons is supposed to explore.
So, what is the Kuiper belt? Well, think of the asteroid belt, this debris loop between Mars and Jupiter, but in this case, it's a massive disk of rock, ice, and other planetary debris. 20 times bigger and 20 to 200 times bigger. in primary school. This particular band of space debris also includes the likes of the Pluto dwarf planet and lies within the confines of our solar system. Even getting these first images is the result of years of hard work and huge investments from NASA.
New Horizons was designed to launch an investigation of Pluto in the early 1990s, but the lack of administrative support almost killed the project. Intense lobbying by the scientific community has prompted NASA leaders to rest, and New Horizons was launched in 2006. Since then, the spacecraft has captured images of the moons of Jupiter and Jupiter, before going further. in the solar system. forwarded to us in 2015.
New Horizons is now 4 billion kilometers from the sun – that is the distance you would travel if you had parked your car and driven to New York two and a half million times – and the ship continues to travel in the deep space.
At this point, grainy composite images may seem as enticing as looking at the static on your old tube TV, but you have to admit that once it gets closer, there will surely be some awesome pictures of the most remote. . In addition, the images of Ultima Thule captured by the spacecraft are the farthest images of the Sun ever taken, surpassing Voyager 1's "Pale Blue Dot" Earth image of about 0.25 billion. kilometers.
New Horizons is now heading for Ultima Thule, covering a distance of about 700,000 miles a day, which, although you can not imagine what it looks like, still seems really fast. Once it has reached the newly discovered object, which is only 30 miles wide, New Horizons will give us a much clearer view of the thing. The planned overflight will be the first close-up observation of an object cradled in Kuiper's giant arms, other than Pluto, and it will be the most distant exploration of all planetary bodies in history. , breaking the record that New Horizons had already set in July. 2015 with his images showing a heart shape on the surface of Pluto.
The photos will also allow us to see Ultima Thule up close and remind everyone that NASA is doing very interesting things. New Horizons' main program, New Frontiers, caused a lot of excitement when color and super Instagram images of Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and even Pluto began to appear. NASA in recent years, a result always useful for officials of the Federal Space Agency, aware that public support and enthusiasm are essential for their work remains a priority.
With Ultima Thule's flyby, New Horizons will literally live up to its name, give us a new horizon to explore and learn, while providing NASA with valuable information while the agency s & # 39; s 39, is preparing to resume manned spaceflight in the coming years. . For now, the scientists and researchers involved are simply thrilled to have made this discovery.
Meanwhile, they are delighted that the probe has already seen Ultima much earlier than expected.
"Our team has been working hard to determine if Ultora has been detected by LORRI at such a distance, and the result is clearly yes," said Alan Stern, principal investigator at New Horizons of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "We now have Ultima in our eyes much further than we thought possible. We are at the door of Ultima, and an amazing exploration is waiting for you. "
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