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September 2nd, 2026
Wait-a-Minute!
Image credit: Barbara David
Yet another wait-a-minute moment in space exploration?
The in boxes at NASA are now pondering a petition regarding the plasma physics of the outer heliosphere.
Retired NASA chief scientist, James Green, has kick-started the petition “expressing the critical need for continued heliophysics measurements by the New Horizons mission and respectfully ask NASA to ensure future data collection and downlink of all the mission’s data.”
New Horizons is the interplanetary space probe launched back in January 2006, the first spacecraft to reconnoiter far-off Pluto…and continues to plow outward and onward on its exploratory trajectory.
Image from Petition: “Heliophysics Community Support for Continued Measurements by NASA’s New Horizons Mission”
Unique measurements
That probe is projected to operate until 2050 and is currently observing the radial evolution of the solar wind, Pick-Up Ions (PUIs), propagating solar disturbances, energetic particles, Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) and dust throughout the entire heliosphere.
New Horizons is equipped to make “historically unique measurements” of H+ and He+ interstellar PUIs that NASA’s Voyager Mission was not equipped to do.
Bottom line: New Horizons is the only spacecraft that can follow up on what Voyager found, and with more advanced instrumentation.
Onward, ever deeper. NASA’s New Horizons.
Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI
Threatened: downlink data
“It is our understanding that continued New Horizons heliophysics measurements are threatened unless NASA finds a way for the Heliophysics Division to fund the data collection and downlink,” the petition notes.
As the only spacecraft now in the outer heliosphere, New Horizons is therefore an essential element to make unique, on-the-spot heliophysics measurements. As the petition states, those remote observations represent “a unique opportunity that will never again arise and must be fully exploited.”
If these New Horizons measurements were to cease, as currently planned, without the Heliophysics Division funding in FY27 and beyond, the petition states “it would signal that NASA cedes the farthest frontier of space exploration.”
The petition is specifically pitched to Nicola Fox, NASA Associate Administrator, Science Mission Directorate, along with Joseph Westlake, Director of the space agency’s Heliophysics Division, and Louise Prockter, Director, of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.
Take a look at the petition that supports continued measurements by NASA’s New Horizons mission at:
Wait-a-Minute!
Image credit: Barbara David
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