12-31-2018, 01:15 AM
This is a thread about the 'New Horizons' mission, which has been studying Pluto and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Solar System:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newho...index.html
The mission was first launched in January 2006 (so long ago that Pluto was still a planet when it set off ). After a nine-year journey, it reached the by-now-demoted Pluto in 2015, and spent close to two years collecting and transmitting data about the dwarf planet. While there, it took a whole host of images of Pluto and its moons; most notably, this high-resolution, true-colour image. (Until then, our best image of it looked like this - so, New Horizons represented quite a leap forward in this department !)
Pluto wasn't the end of this mission, though. On 1st January 2019, it's due to make a fly-by of an even more distant object, known as 'Ultima Thule', which is 6.5 billion kilometres from Earth. This will make it the most distant object ever to have been explored by one of our space probes:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46699737
Let's hope everything goes smoothly!
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newho...index.html
The mission was first launched in January 2006 (so long ago that Pluto was still a planet when it set off ). After a nine-year journey, it reached the by-now-demoted Pluto in 2015, and spent close to two years collecting and transmitting data about the dwarf planet. While there, it took a whole host of images of Pluto and its moons; most notably, this high-resolution, true-colour image. (Until then, our best image of it looked like this - so, New Horizons represented quite a leap forward in this department !)
Pluto wasn't the end of this mission, though. On 1st January 2019, it's due to make a fly-by of an even more distant object, known as 'Ultima Thule', which is 6.5 billion kilometres from Earth. This will make it the most distant object ever to have been explored by one of our space probes:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46699737
Let's hope everything goes smoothly!
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