NASA's New Horizons Continues to Trail Object in Solar System's Badlands

NASA's New Horizons is getting used to being humanity's deep space emissary. After tagging Pluto and its system of moons last year and giving people on Earth an unprecedented and breath taking view of the dwarf planet, New Horizon is now looking forward to another encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) called 2014 MU69, in 2019.

With Pluto being millions of miles away from New Horizon's radar, it is now getting ready for a new mission, an encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) called 2014 MU69. However, the spacecraft remains to do its job along the way. It's doing scientific works and, as the only mission to ever explore the Kuiper Belt, has made a second observation of a distant KBO known as 1994 JR1, which they refined the position to a high precision.

According to Discovery News, with the use of its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), New Horizons in April pictured 1994 JR1 from a distance of approximately 69 million miles. This is already the second time the mission has checked in on the 90 mile wide object. The first time the object was seen was in November of 2015, where the spacecraft was 179 million miles away. These KBO astronomical images are considered to be the closest.

"Combining the November 2015 and April 2016 observations allows us to pinpoint the location of JR1 to within 1,000 kilometers (about 600 miles), far better than any small KBO," said New Horizons science team member Simon Porter, of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

The observations are important since it helps scientists understand where the object came from. There has been belief that 1997 JR1 was Pluto's quasi-satellite once. The new observations dismissed this idea. Using the series of observations, astronomers were also able to understand the rate of the object's spin. News Yac said that experts have been closely monitoring the slight brightening and dimming of the object which equals to brightness changes on 1994 JR1's surface as it rotates. "it is spinning at a rate of once every 5.4 hours, which is "relatively fast" for a KBO," said New Horizons' John Spencer, also from SwRI.

"This is all part of the excitement of exploring new places and seeing things never seen before," he added.