First Distance Object Spotted Beyond Pluto
NASA has recently made quantum leaps in space exploration and discovery after its pioneering spacecraft takes new pictures of a distant and tiny Kuiper Belt object that seems to be circling around the Sun way beyond our solar system's ex-ninth planet Pluto.
The American space agency's New Horizons spacecraft is now starting to send back a stream of new data regarding the mysterious object located within Kuiper Belt as it revolves around the Sun t more than five billion kilometers.
The Kuiper Belt object (KBO) named 1994 JR1 was first imaged last November at a distance of 280 million kilometers. Then just last month, April 7-8, the spacecraft took another shot using a highly advanced Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) from a distance of about 111 million kilometers. As per NASA researchers, the so-called KBO is about 145 kilometers wide. With the discovery, New Horizons science team member Simon Porter of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado revealed that their efforts yielded immensely valuable observations.
"Combining the November 2015 and April 2016 observations allows us to pinpoint the location of JR1 to within 1,000 kilometers (about 600 miles), far better than any small KBO," Porter said as quoted by Space Daily. The recent findings now dispel earlier claims suggesting that JR1 is Pluto's quasi-satellite.
Furthermore, new information also suggests that the post-Pluto KBO rotates rather quickly in its own axis in just 5.4 hours. It also gradually clears the haze as astronomical advancements in the study of KBOs help unveil the mystery behind the Earth's and the solar system's cosmic origins as per Gizmodo report.
In a related development, the New Horizons mission shows no sign of stopping yet as it pursues yet another breathtaking extended mission into the last frontier- a flyby on another KBO, codenamed 2014 MU69, in 2019 as stated in an article published in Popular Science.
KBO 2014 MU69 is an icy rock is on top of the New Horizons team's wish list for NASA-funded exploration. MU69 is relatively unknown but the object is reportedly circling the sun a billion miles beyond Pluto. A flyby could uncover wealth of information that explains how everything started in the solar system.
