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nh-newhorizonskboencounter

More than 3 and a half billion miles away, NASA's New Horizons probe has woken up from its long slumber, ready to take on a new mission in the outer reaches of the solar organisation. New Horizons was launched with the intention of studying Pluto upwards close for the first time, but it had simply a brief window of time to check out the onetime ninth planet. At present it'southward on toward other Kuiper Chugalug objects (KBOs), which could tell the states fifty-fifty more about the solar arrangement than Pluto did.

Most robotic exploration missions involve getting into a stable orbit around the target and setting up shop for several years. Cassini, which just dove into Saturn's temper this morning, spent more than than a decade exploring the gas giant and its system of moons. Still, Pluto is more than half-dozen times farther abroad than Saturn. New Horizons needed a lot of speed to accomplish Pluto, and it actually set the tape for fastest rocket launch always when it went up in 2006. If New Horizons were to enter orbit of Pluto, information technology would need to counter all that speed with a ton of fuel. That wasn't feasible, so its upwardly-shut study of Pluto was a flyby that lasted just a few hours. The upshot is that the probe tin can at present move on to other missions.

The new Horizons team got authority for a mission extension in summer 2022 that allowed them to study other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of ultra-cold objects in the outer solar system. Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet in large role considering we realized it was really simply a large KBO that was spotted long before nosotros understood this region of space.

What KBO MU69 may look similar.

The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode five months ago to conserve resource every bit it headed on toward the next objective. This past Mon, New Horizons sent back a signal confirming that it had woken upwardly from hibernation and executed figurer commands to begin bringing its systems back online. NASA is now hard at work to get the probe completely upwards and running and so it tin train its telescope on several distant KBOs. it will too continue analyzing the radiations and grit in the Kuiper Chugalug.

This autumn's observations are only the start. NASA will also use this period to prep New Horizons for its flyby of a previously unexplored KBO called MU69. The latter was discovered in 2022 and is believed to be nearly 20 miles (xxx kilometers) in diameter. The spacecraft is already on course for MU69, simply the team wants to install a new fault-prevention system before its arrival. The programme is to put New Horizons back into hibernation mode on December 9th. Information technology will near MU69 late next year and will make its flyby on January 1st, 2022.