Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Onward, ever deeper. NASA’s New Horizons on new assignments.
Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI

There’s quite a roster of potential benefits that underscores the importance and milestone-making capabilities of a nuclear-powered craft now in post-Pluto encounter.

Encounter with a KBO! This composite image of the primordial contact binary Kuiper Belt object, officially named Arrokoth, was compiled from data obtained by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it flew by the object on January 1, 2019.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute//Roman Tkachenko

In many ways, New Horizons has become not only the spacecraft that could…but it’s still on duty in extended mission mode, diving ever-deeper into the Kuiper Belt to examine ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, CO. celebrates with New Horizons Flight Controllers after they received confirmation from the spacecraft that it had successfully completed the flyby of Pluto, Tuesday, July 14, 2015 in the Mission Operations Center (MOC) of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Maryland. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Designed and integrated at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006 and carried out a six-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in the summer of 2015, culminating with closest approach of Pluto on July 14, 2015. Its observations in flying by that remote world fit into the “Plutopalooza-class” of revelatory reveals.

But there was more…and there’s more to come.

For more details, go to my new Space.com article – “Far beyond Pluto: What’s next for NASA’s New Horizons probe? – Seven years after its epic Pluto flyby, New Horizons is still going strong” – at:

https://www.space.com/beyond-pluto-nasa-new-horizons-next-steps

New Horizons proposal cover for the probe’s extended mission.
Courtesy: Alan Stern