Wow Factor!

Arrokoth

The New Horizons spacecraft is still journeying outward from the Sun. In fact, it is traveling fast enough to have escape velocity from our solar system, so it will eventually leave the solar system and continue journeying outward to the stars. Of course, as you learned in Chapter 1, the stars are so far away that it will take tens of thousands of years for the spacecraft to reach the distances of even the nearest stars.

Meanwhile, scientists and engineers are still using the spacecraft to make new discoveries within our solar system. As it approached Pluto, scientists searched for other distant objects that were close to the spacecraft’s orbital path, so that it might be able to reach them with only the tiny course corrections that were possible with its limited fuel. After years of searching, in 2014 scientists discovered a very small comet that was within range. New Horizons flew past this comet, which has been named Arrokoth, on New Year’s Day, 2019.

Figure 1 – Arrokoth is the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft.Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko.

New Horizons is still journeying through the region of our solar system known as the Kuiper belt (which contains both Pluto and Arrokoth, along with hundreds of thousands of other small objects), and may yet visit other objects in this region, if scientists find suitable objects along its path.

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