The Exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt by NASA’s New Horizons Mission
Hal Weaver, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
NASA’s New Horizons mission is conducting the first in situ exploration of the Kuiper Belt, the recently discovered outer zone of our Solar System. The New Horizons spacecraft flew just 7800 miles above Pluto’s surface on 2015 July 14 capturing thousands of images and spectra of this magnificent “mini solar system” comprised of the binary dwarf planets Pluto and Charon and the small moons Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. With these new data, Pluto has been transformed from a pixelated blob (as seen from Earth) into a spectacularly complex and diverse world with water-ice mountains as high as the Rockies on Earth and exotic nitrogen-ice sheets with glacier-like flows. Charon has huge chasms bigger than the Earth’s Grand Canyon and a giant hood of dark material covering its north pole. New Horizons has resolved Nix and Hydra for the first time, showing them to be highly elongated objects, covered in water ice, and with crater-like surface features. The New Horizons spacecraft is now more than 46 million miles from Pluto, heading deeper into the Kuiper Belt and potentially a close flyby of another Kuiper Belt object, if NASA approves its extended mission phase.
Hosted by Dr. Frank Summers
Recorded live on October 6, 2015 at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD
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