The New Horizons spacecraft sent back wonderful images of Pluto –
A detail from our Five Escapers poster. A triangle marks the encounter of New Horizons with Pluto in 2015.
– and, journeying on outward through the Kuiper Belt, has studied Arrokoth, a prize example of the planetesimals or small bodies that are the building blocks of planets. This has already given scientists much insight on how our own planet was formed.
The plan was that New Horizons would be steered past more such objects. Not easy or cheap in course corrections, since the spacecraft is more than 5,000,000,000 miles away and the Kuiper Belt objects are tiny and far apart. And now NASA has decided to cut funding. New Horizons will study only the medium through which it is traveling, will not attempt to fly by other targets like Arrokoth. The planetary scientists are severely upset. It’s a false economy. Sending a fresh spacecraft to this distance would cost far more than the few million dollars saved by dropping this essential part of the mission.
No change is needed in the 190 words of our description of New Horizons in the poster.
Mixed metaphor of the week
The government has come under fire from bullish Brexiter backbenchers for its massive U-turn climb-down in watering down and ditching and throwing out the window its sunset-clause guillotine bonfire of red-tape EU laws. -: Medley from Guardian articles, May 12, about a reduction of the plan to waste time and money undoing hundreds of European environmental and workers’-rights regulations .
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
It’s incredibly short sighted to cut New Horizon’s funding. The probe was launched 17 years ago and it’s still working perfectly! We’re not going to get another spacecraft out in that part of the solar system during my lifetime.
But we’ll get to see video of astronauts raising the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the Moon! Surely that’s worth 93 billion dollars (and counting).
NASA should take money from the Artemis program to fund New Horizons (and other programs). It certainly would be a better use of taxpayer money.