Pluto Spacecraft Ready for New Solar System

…The Search For Other Beings Continues.

New Horizons Spacecraft Prepares to Enter the Kuiper Belt: What’s out there? What will we find?

 

Path of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft toward its next potential target, the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) 2014 MU69, nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) by the New Horizons team. NASA must approve any New Horizons extended mission to explore a KBO. Image credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker.

Path of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft toward its next potential target, the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) 2014 MU69, nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) by the New Horizons team. NASA must approve any New Horizons extended mission to explore a KBO. Image credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker.

 

After the success of the Pluto mission, what next?  This remote KBO was one of two identified as potential destinations and the one recommended to NASA by the New Horizons team. Although NASA has selected 2014 MU69 as the target, as part of its normal review process the agency will conduct a detailed assessment before officially approving the mission extension to conduct additional science.

Looking Further Out

“Even as the New Horizons 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,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “While discussions whether to approve this extended mission will take place in the larger context of the planetary science portfolio, we expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science.”

Like all NASA missions that have finished their main objective but seek to do more exploration, the New Horizons team must write a proposal to the agency to fund a KBO mission. That proposal – due in 2016 – will be evaluated by an independent team of experts before NASA can decide about the go-ahead.

Data Continues

 

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The New Horizons spacecraft – currently 3 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometres) from Earth – is just starting to transmit the bulk of the images and other data, stored on its digital recorders, from its historic July encounter with the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and operating normally.

 

Course Corrections Set

Early target selection was important; the team needs to direct New Horizons toward the object this year in order to perform any extended mission with healthy fuel margins. New Horizons will perform a series of four manoeuvres in late October and early November to set its course toward 2014 MU69 – nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) – which it expects to reach on 1 January 2019. Any delays from those dates would cost precious fuel and add mission risk.

“2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.

Path of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft toward its next potential target, the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) 2014 MU69, nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) by the New Horizons team. NASA must approve any New Horizons extended mission to explore a KBO. Image credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker.

“New Horizons was originally designed to fly beyond the Pluto system and explore additional Kuiper Belt objects. The spacecraft carries extra hydrazine fuel for a KBO flyby; its communications system is designed to work from far beyond Pluto; its power system is designed to operate for many more years; and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby.”

Into The Depths

The 2003 National Academy of Sciences’ Planetary Decadal Survey (“New Frontiers in the Solar System”) strongly recommended that the first mission to the Kuiper Belt include flybys of Pluto and small KBOs, in order to sample the diversity of objects in that previously unexplored region of the solar system. The identification of PT1, which is in a completely different class of KBO than Pluto, potentially allows New Horizons to satisfy those goals.

But finding a suitable KBO flyby target was no easy task. Starting a search in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth, the New Horizons team found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the spacecraft.

 

Hubble Eyes Targets

The powerful Hubble Space Telescope came to the rescue in summer 2014, discovering five objects, since narrowed to two, within New Horizons’ flight path. Scientists estimate that PT1 is just under 30 miles (about 45 kilometres) across; that’s more than 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets, like the one the Rosetta mission is now orbiting, but only about 0.5 to 1 percent of the size (and about 1/10,000th the mass) of Pluto. As such, PT1 is thought to be like the building blocks of Kuiper Belt planets such as Pluto.

Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Pluto-like object in the distant Kuiper Belt. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Steve Gribben.

Unlike asteroids, KBOs have been heated only slightly by the Sun, and are thought to represent a well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago.

Never Before Seen

“There’s so much that we can learn from close-up spacecraft observations that we’ll never learn from Earth, as the Pluto flyby demonstrated so spectacularly,” said New Horizons science team member John Spencer, also of SwRI. “The detailed images and other data that New Horizons could obtain from a KBO flyby will revolutionise our understanding of the Kuiper Belt and KBOs.”

NASA believes in the meantime that  probes from earth are likely to find other beings within the next 20 years.  It’s highly unlikely we’re alone in the universe, NASA experts are saying, adding we may be close to finding alien life. In fact, it may happen in the next two decades.

NASA held a panel discussion at the agency’s Washington headquarters on Monday, where space experts talked about the search for Earth-like planets that host life. Based on recent advancements in space telescope technology, scientists estimated that in the coming decades we’ll confirm suspicions that we’re not alone.

“I think in the next 20 years we will find out we are not alone in the universe,” NASA astronomer Kevin Hand said in footage filmed at the discussion and posted on YouTube. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden echoed Hand’s sentiment. “It’s highly improbable in the limitless vastness of the universe that we humans stand alone,” he said.

 

Just this year [2015], NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope picked up on an Earth-like planet in the “habitable zone” of another star. At the time, the observation of the planet, Kepler-186f, was hailed as the first discovery of an Earth-size planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun.

Scientists believe there are potentially many more Earth-like planets in the universe — and some of them could be home to alien life.

“Astronomers think it is very likely that every single star in our Milky Way galaxy has at least one planet,” Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said during the talk. “Sometime in the near future, people will be able to point to a star and say, ‘that star has a planet like Earth.'”

With the expected launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018, NASA’s planet-hunting mission will get an extra boost. The new piece of equipment is designed to study infrared light, making it easier to spot extrasolar planets.

But NASA may need even larger and more powerful telescopes to discover alien life.

To find evidence of actual life is going to take another generation of telescopes,” Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, said. “And to do that, we’re going to need new rockets, new approaches to getting into space, new approaches to large telescopes — highly advanced optical systems.”

huffingtonpost.com presents the following illustrations on this subject: Kepler 22b: ‘We are not alone in the universe’.