New Horizons in the Outer Solar System

The outer solar system  is  the region of space  beyond the planet Neptune,  and the last frontier. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have passed beyond the orbit of Neptune, but have not encountered any more worlds. That all changed with the  New Horizons mission.  The spacecraft spent 10 years flying out to Pluto, and then swept past the ​dwarf planet  on July 14, 2015. It not only looked at Pluto and its five  known moons, but the spacecrafts cameras mapped part of the surface. Other instruments concentrated on finding out more about the atmosphere. New Horizons mages  show that Pluto has a complex surface  with icy plains made of nitrogen ice, surrounded by jagged mountains consisting mostly of water ice. It turns out that Pluto was far more fascinating than anyone expected!   Now that it has passed Pluto, New Horizons  will explore the Kuiper Belt — a region of the solar system that stretches out beyond the planet Neptune and  populated with so-called  Kuiper Belt Objects  (KBOs). The best-known KBOs are  dwarf planets  Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and Haumea.  The mission has been approved to visit another dwarf planet called 2014 MU69, and will sweep past it on January 1, 2018. Luckily, this little world lies right along the missions flight path.   In the far distant future,  New Horizons  will enter the fringes of the Oort Cloud (the shell of icy particles that surrounds the solar system, named for  astronomer Jan Oort).  After that, it will traverse space forever.   New Horizons:  Its  Eyes and Ears​ New Horizons  science instruments were designed to answer questions about Pluto, such as: what does its surface look like? What surface features does it have, such as impact craters or canyons, or mountains?  Whats in its atmosphere? Lets take a look at the spacecraft and its specialized eyes and ears that have shown us so much about Pluto.   Ralph:  a high-resolution mapper with visible and infrared cameras to gather data that will help create very good maps of Pluto and Charon. Alice:  an imaging spectrometer sensitive to ultraviolet light, and built to probe Pluto’s atmosphere. A spectrometer separates light into its wavelengths, like a prism does. Alice  works to produce an image of the target at each wavelength, and will be able to study the â€Å"airglow† at Pluto. Airglow happens when gases in the atmosphere are excited (heated). Alice will track light from a distant star or the Sun through Pluto’s atmosphere to pick out wavelengths of light absorbed by Plutos air, which tells us what the atmosphere contains. REX:  short for radio experiment. It contains sophisticated electronics and is part of the radio telecommunications system. It can measure the weak radio emission from Pluto, and take the temperature of its night side.   LORRI:  the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager,a telescope with a 8.2-inch (20.8-centimeter) aperture that focuses visible light onto a charge coupled device (CCD). Near the time of closest approach, LORRI was built to look at Plutos surface at football-field size resolution.You can see some early images from LORRI here. Pluto travels through the solar wind, a stream of charged particles sweeping out from the Sun. So, New Horizons has the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) detector to measure charged particles from the solar wind to determine whether Pluto has a magnetosphere (a zone of protection created by its magnetic field) and how fast the Plutonian atmosphere is escaping. New Horizons has another plasma-sensing instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI). It will search for neutral atoms that escape Plutos atmosphere and subsequently become charged by their interaction with the solar wind. New Horizons involved college students from the University of Colorado as builders of the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, which counts and measures the sizes of dust particles in interplanetary space.