WASHINGTON: NASA is now reviewing the plan to extend the New Horizons Mission towards the outer region of the Solar System to possibly explore two comet-like objects.
The object under consideration for the mission’s extension is named 2014 MU69. NASA is trying to study the plan that mission scientists presented
Last July, New Horizon spacecraft made history of making its closest approach possible to dwarf planet Pluto at a distance of 12,500 kilometers away. It completed successful flyby that informed humans of what Pluto is made of.
Furthermore, New Horizons not only got necessary data of the planet but its five moons as well – Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
2014 MU69 is about a billion and a half kilometers away from Pluto located in the outer Solar System. Scientists believe that this space object is only 45 kilometers across and could be one of the building blocks in the formation of bigger worlds such as Pluto itself.
The target object occupies a region of the outer Solar System which is commonly called the Kuiper Belt. The region contains freeze samples of how the cosmic neighborhood must be like when the Solar System formed 4.6 Billion years ago.
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Head John Grunsfeld said that, “Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer.” And the mission team expects the extension to be less expensive than their Pluto mission and that they will be able to provide ‘exciting science’ to humans.
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