Secrets of the Kuiper Belt to be revealed: New Horizons brings mysterious object from the early solar system into focus
Wednesday, 18 May 2016
It took New Horizons 10 years and 3 billion miles to reach Pluto - and now it has it's sights set on a new target.
The probe is currently exploring Kuiper Belt, a chilly expanse that holds trillions of mysterious objects leftover from the early solar system.
Today, Nasa released an image it took of 1994 JR1, a 90-mile-wide (145-kilometer-wide) Kuiper Belt object which orbits more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km) from the sun. Warming up for a possible extended mission as it speeds through deep space, New Horizons has now twice observed 1994 JR1.
The image was taken with the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (Lorri) on April 7-8 from a distance of about 69 million miles (111 million km). It shatters New Horizons' own record for the closest-ever views of this KBO in November 2015, when New Horizons detected JR1 from 170 million miles (280 million km) away.
