New Horizons
New Horizons
New Horizons launched into space on
January
19th,
2006
and
is now
unknown km from Earth.
Its primary destination
is
Pluto,
which
it arrived at on
July
14th,
2015
.
Wherever New Horizons goes, it carries its trusty
imaging spectrometers, particle spectrometer, radiometer, solar wind spectrometer, space dust counter, and telescopic camera.
New Horizons often chats with humans from
NASA and JHUAPL.
New Horizons is the first space probe to visit Pluto, its moons, and other icy objects in the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is considered an ancient relic of our solar system and thus is suspected to hold a great deal of insights on how planets form. The probe studied Pluto and its moons for five months during the summer of 2015 and is now studying various Kuiper Belt objects. New Horizons is expected to gain information about the surface, geology, interior makeup and atmospheres of Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects it encounters. Prior to New Horizons, the highest resolution view of Pluto came from the Hubble Space Telescope in low Earth orbit.
Worth Exploring:
- 3D print the New Horizons probe with this .stl file
- New Horizons on Twitter
- an iPhone/iPad app detailing New Horizons' mission and updates
(top image: Pluto as seen by New Horizons on July 13, 2015, NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)