After its historical fly-by of Pluto last year, New Horizons is now well on its way to explore more of the Kuiper Belt’s area and objects. Its new target is (most likely) KBO2014-MU69, which the spacecraft is expected to reach in January 2019. There’s now evidence that New Horizons has already entered the zone of interest. Why? Because of the dust it faces on its journey.
According to the CU-Boulder team that works with NASA on this one, New Horizons measured the space around Pluto as containing only a slim amount of debris during the fly-by, about six dust particles per cubic mile. This is normal, since “any debris created when Pluto’s moons were captured or created during impacts has long since been removed by planetary processes.”
However, the team continued, “now we are now starting to see seeing a slow but steady increase in the impact rate of larger particles, possibly indicating that we already have entered the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt.”
That’s interesting – since we don’t have a lot of precise data about exactly where in space this border lies.
Where New Horizons is now, however?
There’s a site that gives its position at all time, together with some other information. This snapshot was taken today:
The green line shows the path New Horizons has traveled since launch, while the red indicates what is going to do next (for more about the possible targets, see this post).
For more details about Pluto’s and its space, read the paper the team has published in Science on March 17, 2016, reference: Bagenal et al. (2016) “Pluto’s interaction with its space environment: Solar wind, energetic particles, and dust”, Science, Vol. 351, Issue 6279, DOI: 10.1126/science.aad9045, available here.