Fly with the New Horizons spacecraft as it cruises by dozens of newly-discovered Kuiper Belt objects, found by our survey team (gray points) as well as by members of the public through Ice Hunters (purple points). See below for details.
Animation concept and rendering by Alex Harrison Parker, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
=== Mission to Pluto and Beyond: The search for a Kuiper Belt target ===
On July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will become the first mission to visit the distant dwarf planet Pluto and its retinue of five moons, flying by at speeds over 50 times faster than a jet airliner.
With its onboard reserve of fuel, it is capable of performing a small course correction after this Pluto encounter, with the aim of visiting another small, frozen world deep in the Kuiper Belt. At present, however, there are no known Kuiper Belt objects which New Horizons can reach with its remaining fuel.
A team of scientists from across the world are making a concerted effort to identify this prime Kuiper Belt encounter target. Using some of the worlds largest telescopes, we are searching the area of sky where such an encounter target would be today. This area of sky is extremely difficult to search for faint Kuiper Belt objects, owing to the fact that it lies in the direction of the core of our Galaxy where the number of background stars is extremely high. Our team has developed a suite of advanced algorithms for searching this data, however, and we have discovered a host of new Kuiper Belt objects which will fly near the spacecraft - though none yet fit the perfect "encounter target" criteria.
=== Animation Details ===
This animation shows the flight of the New Horizons spacecraft from 2010 to 2023 through this cloud of new Kuiper Belt objects.
The yellow triangle indicates the position of the New Horizons spacecraft. The large cyan point marks Pluto. Small gray points are new Kuiper Belt objects discovered by the automated routines in the 2011-2012 observing seasons, while purple points are new Kuiper Belt objects discovered in 2004-2005 observing season data by members of the public through the "IceHunters" citizen science effort.
The left panels show a top-down and side-on view of the spacecraft trajectory and the Kuiper Belt objects. Distance scales from the Sun are illustrated with gray lines, and the pericentric and apocentric distances of Uranus and Neptune are marked with dashed white lines.
The right panel shows the Kuiper Belt objects from the perspective of the New Horizons spacecraft, looking directly outward from the Sun. Point size scales with distance, but the sizes are not to scale (almost all of the Kuiper Belt objects so far detected will be unresolved by the instruments onboard the spacecraft). For any Kuiper Belt object which passes within 2 AU of the spacecraft, the range in AU is marked.
A "flyby" sound is generated by the distance and flyby geometry of each object. Since there is no sound in space, this sound is there purely to enhance the impression of motion through the Kuiper Belt.
The orbital motion of the Kuiper Belt objects is extrapolated from the best-fit orbit solutions to the data we have currently obtained. For many objects these orbit solutions remain relatively uncertain, so the exact flyby geometry may change as we acquire new and better data.
Two long-range flybys occur before the Pluto encounter, one late 2013 and one in early 2015.
The "cluster" of flybys that begins in June of 2018 is due to the onset of the "cold classical Kuiper Belt," a region of space densely populated by Kuiper Belt objects.
The hunt for an encounter target continues, and future versions of this animation will be updated as new Kuiper Belt objects are discovered.
=== Links ===
More information on the New Horizons mission:
pluto.jhuapl.edu/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
Follow New Horizons on Twitter:
twitter.com/NewHorizons2015
Follow Alex Parker on Twitter:
twitter.com/Alex_Parker
=== Video Credits ===
Alex Harrison Parker - New Horizons Outer Solar System Science Fellow, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The 2011-2012 New Horizons Kuiper Belt Object search team & contributors:
(alphabetical by first name)
Alan Stern, Brian Mcleod, Cesar Fuentes, Darin Ragozzine, David Borncamp, David Osip, David Tholen, David Trilling, Francesca DeMeo, Jean-Marc Petit, JJ Kavelaars, John Spencer, Larry Wasserman, Marc Buie, Matthew Holman, Rick Binzel, Scott Sheppard, Sebastian Fabbro, Stephen Gwyn, and Susan Benecchi.
The IceHunters organized by Pamela Gay, and a list of contributors to the 2004-2005 discoveries can be found here: minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K12/K12FA9.html
Информация по комментариям в разработке