A year from today, NASA scientists will have a chance to explore a small space rock in the outer solar system. It will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny reports.
The object is located in the Kuiper Belt four billion miles from Earth. It’s the next stop for NASA’s New Horizons, the first spacecraft to capture up-close photographs of Pluto.
Will Grundy of Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory is on the mission team. "We’d really like to see how the solar system formed, and to do that you have go to the places where there are leftovers from that time, and the Kuiper Belt is this large disk of debris outside the giant planets that is chock-full of these objects," he says.
Grundy says not much is known about this object yet. It’s dark red in color and has a lumpy shape. It might be actually two objects in close orbit, and it may have at least one tiny moon.
Scientists will celebrate the New Years’ Day flyby from mission control in Maryland next year.
