Pluto may be long gone , but NASA ’s New Horizons space vehicle is by no means finish up with the outer solar system . For the second meter , New Horizonshas observed1994 JR1 , a 90 - Roman mile all-inclusive Kuiper Belt Object ( KBO ) that orb over 3 billion mile from the sunlight .
The latest observation , which were made on April 7th and eighth by New Horizons ’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and composited in the gif below , smash the spacecraft ’s own track record for our near encounter with a KBO.That record was set in November , when New Horizons observed JR1 from a length of over 170 million mile .
Here was JR1 back in November :
And here it is last month , from a space of just 69 million miles :
The latest observations allow the New Horizons science squad to start flesh out a portrait of the lonely space rock . We can now nail the localization of JR1 to within 600 statute mile , return us our most precise KBO orbit to date . Having nailed down its coordinates , uranologist can rule out a hypothesis that JR1 is some sort of Plutonian orbiter . The new data point also unwrap that JR1 is spinning quickly , fill out a full rotation about its axis of rotation once ever 5.4 hour .
“ This is all part of the excitement of exploring new position and see things never come across before , ” John Spencer , a New Horizons science team member Southwest Research Institute in Boulder say in astatement .
Indeed , these are our first tantalizing glimpses of a mystic kingdom whose existence astronomers only learn of a few decades ago . you’re able to think of the Kuiper Belt as a Brobdingnagian cryobank , fill with primordial chunks of rock that have not been have-to doe with or transformed since the birth of the solar system . meditate the KBOs could divulge our own cosmic origin story — which is why the New Horizons mission operators back on Earth are trying to convince NASA that we ought to conduct a skinny flyby of yet another KBO,2014 MU69 , in 2019 .
You should be crossing your fingers that the extended New Horizons mission gets unripe - lit . The Pluto flyby completely revolutionized our view on a tiny cosmos we thought we sympathize . It ’s hard to imagine that pulling up nigh to another distance ice ball wo n’t shatter even more preconceptions about the out solar organisation .
[ NASA ]
AstronomyNASANew HorizonsPlutoSpace
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