"NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flies off on a ten-year journey with a visit to the planet Pluto and beyond!"
On January 19, 2006, when the powerful 67-meter Atlas V rocket, with a tiny interplanetary vehicle hidden in its almost empty fairing, took off into the blue sky, these words burst from loudspeakers, thrilling hearts and minds of people. Many thousands gathered at Cape Canaveral and watched more on TV and on the Internet. It was the fastest launch from Earth, as the valuable cargo was sent to the most distant objects ever visited by space probes. When the giant Atlas finally shed its greatness from the launch pad, the words "go on!" didn't get much attention amid all this love of Pluto.
But now, almost 13 years later, we are about to find out what they really meant.
Beyond Pluto
The Kuiper Belt is an immense, distant repository of millions of frozen, primitive objects that was thought to exist for a long time, but was only confirmed during the mission to Pluto in 1990. The discovery of the early 1990s showed that Pluto was not just an oddity on the outer edge of the solar system, but part of a completely unexplored territory beyond the orbit of Neptune. This discovery helped organize scientific support for the mission, which later turned into an expedition to Pluto and the Kuiper belt.
In our fantasy shows, the spaceships of the centuries to come are always versatile and capable of traveling wherever their fearless captains go. In the 21st century, we are still in an era where our spaceships are designed for one-time use and only for specific purposes. Because often they only have enough fuel for this. Several times we managed to send our ships on additional missions to visit another comet or asteroid.
Yet one of the many exceptional features of New Horizons is that it was designed from the start to travel beyond Pluto and explore other worlds that were not even identified at launch. This was necessary because at the time of its takeoff, no Kuiper belt object was known that could reach New Horizons after visiting Pluto. However, our statistical knowledge of the Kuiper Belt has shown that there must be many such objects, and we can detect them while New Horizons is on the way. As soon as this happens, "New Horizons" will be redirected to new objects.
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The search did not go according to plan. Finding a destination after Pluto has proven much more difficult than anticipated. This was largely due to the fact that the region of the sky that should be explored was not far from the center of the Milky Way galaxy - against the background of which it was very difficult to see faint, rare objects. Because the stars are densely located in the center of the galaxy. When New Horizon made its nine-year journey through the solar system, years of searching for the best ground-based telescopes could not find a suitable object. It got to the point that the success of the continued mission to the Kuiper belt was called into question.
Only an unscheduled search with the Hubble Space Telescope could have saved the day. In June 2014, just a year before meeting Pluto, the Hubble was commissioned and the New Horizons team was able to find two sites to visit, given the available fuel. Of these, MU69, now known as Ultima Thule, a Greek-Latin expression meaning “beyond the known world”, was in a more favorable orbit for interception.
And now, after the flyby of Pluto in July 2015 and the discovery of this dwarf planet and its five satellites in all their amazing and variegated glory, the New Horizons are heading towards Ultima Thule, which orbits another one and a half billion kilometers further from Earth than Pluto. On New Year's Eve, Ultima Thule will become the most distant world ever explored by man, as the New Horizons will fly several thousand kilometers from its surface.
The closest approach will take place 33 minutes after midnight, but on Earth this will only be known the next morning. At a distance of six billion kilometers, communication takes a very long time: it will take light 12 hours to cover the distance between the Earth and the spacecraft. The probe will be left on its own in its final maneuvers. We can say that the probe will celebrate the New Year near a distant dwarf planet with us.
Separately, it should be said that the probe has no idea what it will face. We usually send machines knowing a lot more about our target than we do about Ultima Thula now. Now we know only its approximate size (about 33 kilometers across) and the shape of a peach with two lobes. Maybe they are two separate objects circling in a dance. The planet itself is slightly redder than Pluto.
Because Ultima Thule is so far away, so small and dark, we have no spectral clues as to its surface composition. And because it's such a small target, and New Horizons is moving so fast, it can only make out a handful of pixels a couple of days before the collision. This encounter will start and end very quickly even compared to other overflights.
The same set of seven precise instruments that Pluto revealed to us three years ago will be used to quickly but thoroughly study Ultima Thule and its surroundings. Are there many craters on it? Is it homogeneous or not? Rough or Smooth? Rocky or Arctic? Soon we will receive answers and learn not only about the history of this mysterious object, but also about one more detail of the origin of the solar system. The Kuiper Belt is the solar system's remote construction depot, where building materials from known planets are stored in a cool, dry place. What relics he keeps, we still have to learn, and "New Horizons", funnily enough, will really expand our horizons in this knowledge.
And with a little luck, this seasoned space traveler will find another world before setting off to roam the galaxy forever. Another daring spacecraft that has served humanity faithfully and lost in the darkness of space.
Ilya Khel