NASA's New Horizons Detects Mysterious World Beyond Pluto

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has reportedly discovered a mysterious celestial rock beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. The space probe released an image of the distant space object under the name 1994 JR1. The 145-kilometer-wide space rock orbits more than 5 billion kilometers from the sun in the Kuiper Belt.

The mysterious celestial body was first detected by New Horizons at a distance of 280 million kilometers away from it. Later on, the spacecraft was able to get a closer look at it on April 7 and 8, as well as capture images through its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager from a distance of 111 million kilometers.

According to a NASA report, scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) could understand that 1994 JR1 is not just a quasi satellite of Pluto as thought before, on the basis of the images captured by New Horizons. The photos also helped the researchers to identify the mysterious rock's position and rotation period; the latter incidentally takes 5.4 hours and indicates the duration of one JR1 day. 

#NewHorizons collects 1st #science on #1994JR1: a 90mile/145km wide post-#Pluto #KBO orbiting >3b miles/5b km fm sun pic.twitter.com/ti1o8rtnYx

— Spyder Webb (@Spyder_Webb) May 18, 2016

SWRI's science team member, John Spencer, feel that a new phase of discovering more ancient celestial bodies in the Kuiper Belt region has opened following the New Horizon's observations. Furthermore, the spacecraft is expected to take even closer images of these objects with its proposed extended mission by NASA. "This is all part of the excitement of exploring new places and seeing things never seen before," John Spencer said. An extended mission will also mean that New Horizons will have a super close flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt area around Jan. 1, 2019, namely the 2014 MU69, resulting in more outer space discoveries. Last year, New Horizons flew through the Pluto system and made the first close-up observations of the icy planet and its five moons.

I made that GIF! 1994 JR1 is a lot closer and brighter this time, and we're going to take a lot more pictures. https://t.co/mNJUUBvfin — Simon Porter (@AscendingNode) April 7, 2016

— Spyder Webb (@Spyder_Webb) May 18, 2016