New Horizons Data From Pluto Finally Arrives, And Astronomers Are ‘Putting A Bow Around It’

NASA’s New Horizons space probe has been busy the past few years. After traveling roughly 4.67 billion miles to reach the dwarf planet Pluto’s system in July of 2015, the spacecraft is now moving on to its next target, an object discovered in the Kuiper Belt by the Hubble Space Telescope in June of 2014 and dubbed 2014 MU69.

Pluto also lies in the Kuiper Belt, a “distant region surrounds the solar system and is filled with trillions of icy rocks that have yet to be explored,” as Space.com calls it. However, 2014 MU69 is approximately another 1 billion miles beyond Pluto.

While researches patiently wait for New Horizons to make its way to 2014 MU69, they will have an abundance of data sent back from the probe’s Pluto flyby to keep them occupied.

“The New Horizons flyby of the Pluto system was completely successful, and now we’ve got all the data on the ground and we’re putting a bow around it,” Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute, said in a Facebook Live event on Thursday, according to Space.com.

New Horizons sent back an array of images and other data from the Pluto system. Some of what was discovered was anticipated by astronomers and other scientists. Other bits of information, however, came as somewhat of a surprise to researchers.

“One thing that we discovered is that small planets can be just as complex as big planets, and that really blew away our expectations,” Stern said.

Click here to continue and read more...

New Horizons Data From Pluto Finally Arrives, And Astronomers Are ‘Putting A Bow Around It’ is an article from: The Inquisitr News