NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is getting ready for its next big mission in the icy outskirts of the solar system nearly two years after its encounter with the dwarf planet Pluto. The spacecraft is now headed towards an object located in the Kuiper Belt roughly 1.6 billion kilometers away. This region is filled with trillions of icy rocks and remains unexplored. The new mission target was discovered in June 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope was named 2014 MU69.
Pluto which lost its planetary status after New Horizons launch in 2006 is also a Kuiper Belt Object and the largest of its kind. In 2014, 2015 New Horizons became the first spacecraft to visit Pluto when it flew by the dwarf planets and its moons. The spacecraft to about 16 months to send its data of the dwarf planet, this gave scientists new insights on Pluto and its moons.
Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute said that the New Horizons’ flyby of the Pluto system was completely successful. Scientists now have a global map of the dwarf planet, detailed images of Pluto’s mountainous landscape and icy volcanoes. Tall mountain ranges is suggestive of recent geological activity on the planet’s surface.
A detailed photograph beamed by New Horizons quickly became Pluto’s famous feature. Unofficially called the Tombaugh Regio, the feature is a huge heart-shaped basin. Scientists said that the basin seems to indicate the presence of a subsurface ocean. The spacecraft’s flyby also gave scientists the opportunity to study Charon, one of Pluto’s moons. It was discovered that once face of Charon always faces Pluto and vice-versa. As a result of being tidally locked, Pluto’s heart is always facing its moon, Charon. The moon was also discovered to be taking part of its atmosphere from Pluto as indicated by the moon’s giant red spot as reported in SPACE.com.
New Horizons also found evidence of ices flowing across Pluto’s surface at the left edge of the heart-shaped basin. Close images taken by the craft’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager reveal signs of geologic activity. According to John Spencer, co-investigator of the mission, surfaces like this are seen only on active worlds like Earth and Mars. The images also showed an area that lies within the western half of Pluto’s heart-shaped region that is the size of Texas where a sheet of ice appears to have flowed and may still be flowing reminiscent of Earth’s glaciers as reported in an article by NASA.
