REAL LIFE NEWS: NEW HORIZONS DETECTS ITS NEXT TARGET
by Hazed
The New Horizons spacecraft has been able to identify the Kuiper Belt object it is heading towards, called Ultima Thule.
Having buzzed around Pluto and its moons, the craft has been travelling to the very edges of the Solar System and in four months time it will arrive at its destination. A few weeks ago, it used its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager to see the small, dim object against a dense background of stars, despite being over 100 million miles away.
Images have been sent back to Earth and you can see them at the link below. There’s not much to see, it’s just one white blob amongst many, but the fact that New Horizons has managed to find it with its own camera is significant.
Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist, said: “The image field is extremely rich with background stars, which makes it difficult to detect faint objects. It really is like finding a needle in a haystack. In these first images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the side of a background star that’s roughly 17 times brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter – and easier to see – as the spacecraft gets closer.”
Now New Horizons has got Ultima Thule in its sights it will help the mission team to refine its course.
It will arrive in the early morning on 1 January 2019.
