BRENT: NASA’s spaceship New Horizons is at last drawing near to Pluto about nine years after setting off on the three-billion-mile journey from Earth.
Pluto is around 3.67 billion miles from the Sun and, when it was discovered in 1930, it was the planet furthest from the solar system’s centre.
But in 2006 it was relegated to being a “dwarf planet” in the Kuiper Belt, the group of objects beyond the region of planets such as Earth.
The belt and the Oort Cloud, another band of icy objects that is even further away, are among space’s final frontiers and both are thought to be the source of comets.
New Horizons launched on 19 January, 2006, and has spent the 1,873 days between then and now “hibernating” to preserve its electrical components.
It had 18 hibernation periods, the most recent ending 162 million miles from Pluto, when the signal telling scientists of its activity took almost five hours to reach Earth.
From 15 January it will begin examining the planet and it is hoped that its images will be even better than those beamed back to Earth by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Project scientist Dr Hal Weaver, from the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, US, said the project was “a journey to a new class of planets we’ve never seen, in a place we’ve never been before”.
He added: “For decades we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it’s really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them.”
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