Pluto may be extended gone, but NASA’s latest Horizons spacecraft is by no means finished with the outer solar system. For the second time, latest Horizons has observed 1994 JR1, a 90-mile wide Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that orbit over 3 billion miles from the sun.
The newest observations, which were complete on April 7th and 8th by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and composited in the gif below, smash the spacecraft’s own proof for our closest encounter with a KBO. That record was set in November, when New Horizons experiential JR1 from a space of over 170 million miles.
And here it is previous month, from a distance of just 69 million miles:The newest observations, which were complete on April 7th and 8th by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and composited in the gif below, smash the spacecraft’s own proof for our closest encounter with a KBO. That record was set in November, when New Horizons experiential JR1 from a space of over 170 million miles.
The New observations allowed the latest Horizons science team to begin fleshing out a portrait of the lonely space rock. We can now pinpoint the site of JR1 to within 600 miles, giving us our most precise KBO orbit to date. Having nailed down its coordinate, astronomers can rule out a theory that JR1 is some sort of Plutonian satellite. The new data as well reveals that JR1 is spinning quickly, completing a complete rotation about its axis once every 5.4 hours.
“This is all part of the excitement of exploring latest places and seeing things never seen before,” John Spencer, a latest Horizons science team member Southwest study Institute in Boulder said in a statement.
Indeed, these are our opening tantalizing glimpses of a mysterious realm whose being astronomers only learned of a few decades ago. You can think of the Kuiper Belt as a vast cryobank, full with primordial chunks of rock that have not been touch or transformed since the birth of the solar system. Study the KBOs could disclose our own cosmic origin story—which is why the New Horizons mission operator back on Earth are trying to convince NASA that we ought to conduct a lock flyby of yet another KBO, 2014 MU69, in 2019.
You should be crossing your finger that the extended New Horizons work gets green-lit. The Pluto flyby completely revolutionized our viewpoint on a tiny world we thought we understood. It’s hard to imagine that pulling up close to one more distance ice ball won’t shatter even extra preconceptions about the external solar system.
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