Looking for a NEW HORIZON
There’s a good chance that as you read these words, almost seven lighthours from Earth an explorer is opening its eyes to the tenebrous emptiness of deep space. That explorer is the New Horizons spacecraft, currently sailing through the outer Solar System at 50,000km/h. This December it will spend several days turning one of its cameras towards some of the small, icy bodies that live in the deep recesses of this isolated realm.
While the pictures returned by this new set of observations will be little more than dots against a starry backdrop, they could help researchers plumb the deep history of our planetary neighbourhood.
When it launched in 2006, New Horizons’ primary target was the Pluto system. The one-time planet and its moons lie some 5.75 billion km from Earth, within a zone of our planetary neighbourhood that astronomers call the Kuiper Belt. Here, beyond the orbit of the gas giant Neptune, lie not only Pluto and several other frozen worlds over 1,100km in diameter, but thousands of smaller, icy objects.
New Horizons’ exploration of Pluto was humanity’s first
