Categories
Universe Today

Pluto team updates science from the solar system’s edge

Nearly eight years after its historic Pluto flyby, NASA’s New Horizons probe is getting ready for another round of observations made from the icy edge of the solar system — and this time, its field of view will range from Uranus and Neptune to the cosmic background far beyond our galaxy.

Scientists on the New Horizons team shared their latest discoveries, and provided a preview of what’s ahead, during this week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

It’s been 17 years since the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft was launched toward Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, The primary mission hit its peak in 2015 when the probe zoomed past Pluto, but the adventure moved on to a second act that focused on a smaller, two-lobed object called Arrokoth — a name derived from the Powhatan/Algonquin word for “sky.”

Scientists are still sifting through the data from the Pluto flyby, and from the Arrokoth flyby on New Year’s Day of 2019, more than 4 billion miles from the sun.

Categories
GeekWire

Arrokoth sheds new light on planetary origins

Arrokoth
A computer-generated reconstruction of Arrokoth’s shape makes it look like a squashed snowman, but slightly less squashed than originally thought. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Image / Roman Tkachenko)

The space snowman that was the focus of a close encounter with NASA’s New Horizons probe last year is helping scientists answer a cosmic question: How did the building blocks of the solar system get their start?

“This is a game-changer,” said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator for the New Horizons mission.

Stern and other members of the New Horizons science team shared their latest findings about the snowman-shaped object now known as Arrokoth today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Seattle. Those findings are detailed in a trio of studies published by the journal Science.

Get the full story on GeekWire.