Discoveries by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft! From Pluto's moon Charon to a special kind of ice we look at what the mission found.

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Kuiper Belt
It's all good though, because Pluto, and its main moon Charon , along with four more, made worthy targets for investigation. All of the planetesimals , dwarf planets, comets, and millions of smaller objects are part of the Kuiper Belt that surrounds our whole solar system. Most of the Kuiper Belt objects have unusual orbits that aren't well-aligned with the planetary plane of the ecliptic where most of the full-sized planets are. In comparison, our Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, is nothing like you see in bad Sci-Fi films. The odds of two objects being within sight of each other are actually remarkably small. While there are over 200 objects that are more than 100 kilometers across and at least one million one-kilometer objects, they are very far apart in a very big space. The Kuiper Belt, on the other hand, has thousands of times more objects so there is a lot to investigate out there. It possesses untouched and uncontaminated leftovers from the formation of the Solar System. It's like a history book just waiting to be read.

Almost a Decade to Get There
It's pretty hard to believe, but the New Horizons Mission faced a lot of apathetic opposition. The detractors actually thought that Pluto was going to be pretty dull and not worth the effort of visiting. The mission was on and off again so many times that it took an immense amount of focus from the New Horizons scientists to finally get it, literally, off the ground and into space. They used the biggest rocket available, The Atlas, and made the lightest spacecraft they could manage. As a result, at launch it made it to the moon in nine hours, compared to the Apollo Program, which took nearly four days to get to the Moon. They also used a gravity slingshot effect around Jupiter to add another few kilometers per second, shaving about 3 years off of the total flight time. They got to Pluto in just nine years with the fastest traveling spaceship in human history. It hit speeds of 1.6 million kilometers per day. That's 66,000 kilometers per hour, or 1,100 kilometres per minute, or 18.5 kilometers per second.

What did New Horizons Find?
The enthusiasts knew it was going to be good, and all the detractors were surprised at just how interesting it really was. In mid-2014, at a distance of about 430 million kilometers, approximately three times the distance between Earth and Sun, the team powered the systems back on and started to take multiple daily images. Details started to become clearer and clearer; the surface was surprisingly multihued with light and dark patches and, finally, as they closed in, vivid colors like reddish browns. The first big surprise was the giant Valentines heart-shape about the size of Texas on one side. With a data rate of only 1 Kilo-bit per second, it took a very long time to start getting picture data, not to mention the 4.5 hour time delay due to the speed of light. From this data they could watch the orbital dance of Charon and Pluto as they spun about their barycenter.

#spacediscoveries #pluto #nasa