Scientists at NASA Discover Real Evidence of Kuiper Belt

The New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto in 2015, is set to encounter the Kuiper Belt object, referred to as 2014 MU69-nicknamed Ultima Thule-on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, 2019. In 2014 it was detected that the object MU69 is more than 6.5 billion km away from Earth.

On August 16, News Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took a set of 48 images, from 172 million kms, 64 billion kms from the Sun and against a dense background of stars. NASA in recent times has developed a New Horizons spacecraft (NHS) which can detect images from as far as billion kilometres away from us. It has discovered its next flyby target, which is an icy world a billion kilometres past Pluto, from more than 160 million kilometres away and over four months ahead of its New Year’s 2019 close encounter. Hal Weaver, a New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, US, quoted that “The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects,”, further he stated that, its similar to finding a needle in a haystack. In these first images, Ultima looks like a bump on the side of a background star that’s around 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter and easier to see as the spacecraft gets closer. The Ultima flyby will be the premier closest observation of a tiny Kuiper Belt object and the farthest investigation of any planetary body in history ever, shocking up the records, which was set by New Horizons itself at Pluto in July 2015 by about 16 billion kms. The monitoring of Ultima over the next four months will assist the New Horizons team to clarify the spacecraft’s itinerary towards the immediate slant to Ultima, at 12:33 AM EST on January 1, 2019.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ultima-in-view-nasa-s-new-horizons-makes-first-detection-of-kuiper-belt-flyby-target