It has a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects KBOs in the decade to follow. It is the fifth of five artificial objects to achieve the escape velocity that will allow them to leave the Solar System others being Pioneer 10 — launched in , Pioneer 11 — launched in , Voyager 2 — launched in August , and Voyager 1 — Launched in September Author Recent Posts.
I am a software developer, a former road racing cyclist, and a science enthusiast. Also an animal lover! I write about the planet Earth and science on this website, ourplnt. It took about 15 months to download all six gigabytes of collected data. So what did New Horizons find? Learn more about exploring the Earth-Moon system. The mission revealed Pluto in splendid detail. The surface is covered in frozen nitrogen, with some methane, carbon monoxide, and water ices too.
The surface appears reddish in certain regions. Some regions are redder than others. We think this is an indicator of the age of the surface.
The regions that are more red have been around longer and so have a thicker coating of organics. The whiter regions are younger, and thus, the layer of organics is thinner. When we use crater counting to determine the relative ages of the whiter and redder regions, we find the same result: The regions with reddish organic coating have more craters than the regions with less coating.
Yes, New Horizons is still sending data. Michael E. Summers , a professor of Planetary Sciences and Astronomy at the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and New Horizons co-investigator, admits that the question about leaving the solar system is baffling the scientific community. Although it gets weaker farther away from the Sun, there is no boundary at which it stops.
Indeed, astronomers are still discovering objects that orbit in the outer solar system beyond Pluto. Sedna is one of the most distant known objects in the solar system. But currently, the most distant known object is the dwarf planet VP Both Sedna and VP were found near their closest approach to the Sun, but they both have orbits that go out to hundreds of AU, at which point they would be too faint to discover.
As was the case with the Voyager 1 spacecraft, NASA announced in March that its probe left our planetary system and entered interstellar space after it detected a marked change in the plasma environment when it reached a distance of nearly AU from the Sun.
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