14 DAY TRIAL // The NASA New Horizons spacecraft is currently on its way to the dwarf planet Pluto, at the outskirts of our solar system. The object, located in the Kuiper Belt, will be just the first stop for the probe. Now, the general public has a chance to help experts decided on other targets of interest.
The robot is scheduled to arrive at the dwarf planet in mid-2015. Its main mission will be to investigate this celestial object in close detail, and to image and analyze its surface. A portion of the mission will also be spent looking at the Plutonian moons.
The planet has three moons. Charon is the largest and definitely the most interesting, while Nix and Hydra are a lot smaller. Though it's difficult to provide an exact figure, experts estimate that their diameter does not exceed 50 miles, or around 80 kilometers.
After New Horizons finishes the first leg of its mission, it will be free to explore other targets, and Zooniverse is launching a new initiative, called IceHunters, to get people involved in the selection.
Explore other Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) will provide astronomers with insights into areas of the solar system that have been studied only minimally. Most observations conducted thus far were carried out using space telescopes, whose instruments do not allow for a clear view of the small objects.
Pluto shares the Kuiper Belt with other dwarf planets, including Haumea, Makemake and Eris. A vast number of large asteroids, protoplanetary bodies, comets and dwarf planets may exist there as well.
Since NASA has not yet made a clear decision on which course of action to follow after the Pluto flyby, IceHunters may provide the space agency with the inspiration it needs, Universe Today reports.
“Projects like this make the public part of modern space exploration. The New Horizon’s mission was launched knowing we’d have to discover the object it would visit after Pluto. Now is the time to make that discovery and thanks to IceHunters, anyone can be that discoverer,” Dr. Pamela Gay explains.
“The New Horizons project is breaking new ground in many ways,” adds the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, Alan Stern. He adds that New Horizons will most likely do flybys of KBO between 2016 and 2020.
“We’re flying by a new kind of planet and we’ll be making the most distant encounters with planetary bodies in the history of space exploration, and now we’re employing citizen science to help find our potential extended mission flyby targets, perhaps a billion kilometers farther than even distant Pluto and its moons,” he adds.
“We’re very excited to be working with Zooniverse and breaking this new kind of ground. We hope the public will be excited to join in with us and with Zooniverse to make a little history of their own by discovering our next flyby target after Pluto,” the expert concludes.