CANADA: According to reports, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has a new target after its flyby of Pluto. Its new target is known as 2014 MU69, which is a comet-like object that was being considered by scientists related to the mission.
The space agency has to conduct a review of the plan prior to officially approving extension of the mission. In July, New Horizons conducted its flyby of Pluto when it approached 12,500 km from surface of the dwarf planet.
The spacecraft took detailed pictures and other data from Pluto as well as its moons: Styx, Charon, Kerberos, Nix and Hydra. The new target is nearly a billion and a half km beyond Pluto. As per reports, it is nearly 45km across and is considered to be a building block from which worlds like Pluto are created.
As per scientists, these kinds of objects lead to formation of a region of the outer Solar System known as Kuiper Belt that consists of a deep-freeze sample of condition of cosmic neighborhood when it was formed 4.6 billion years ago.
According to John Grunsfeld, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, “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”.
As per the mission’s principal investigator, Alan Stern, selection of 2014 MU69 by the agency is “a great choice”.
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