Is NASA About to Cancel New Horizon's Mission? Here's What We Know

whole of operation this is Anton and today we're going to briefly discuss what's happening with the New Horizons probe that you can sort of see right here this is a simulation from NASA after incredible observations from Pluto and a flyby of another object known as Erica back in 2019 and though by itself this Mission has been already active for about 17 years technically its official mission

is over and it's been basically conducting what's known as extended Mission with the main focus being the region known as the Kuiper belt and even though up to date this is actually a really successful Mission and right now the probe is still operating at 100 because of the recently reshuffling at Nasa that I've discussed I think about two months ago in the last few months NASA

has actually been trying to sort of condense some of its programs in some sense cut away some fat here and there in order to basically focus on specific missions the ones that are going to be launching in the next few years which is a result meant that the mission that gave us this beautiful picture of Pluto followed by the unusual observations from erikos who was not

served in a bit of a pickle but the pickle Bean NASA wasn't sure what to do with the mission or if it should actually continue studying what's known as planetary objects and maybe instead switch to something entirely different and so because of this in the last few weeks following the report that you can find right here a report that's over 100 pages long some of the

NASA administrators suggested that maybe New Horizons should now switch to solar observations or what's known as Helio physics instead of trying to study more rocks which basically meant one thing the entire team led by the planetary scientist Alan Stern would have to be pretty much completely replaced by someone entirely different when the main focus now being the Sun instead of being planets but what exactly is

the reason in here well the main point here is kind of simple to understand since the visitation of Pluto and the flyby near ericoth in the last four years the scientists were trying to use various telescopes including the Japanese Subaru to try to find additional rocks or additional planetary bodies that they could maybe observed by conduct till another flyby since ericoth was such a weird Discovery

and provided so much good science here the scientists argued that we could maybe do something similar again discovering even more in the process but the problem is that well things in space are really far away and it's generally not very easy to change direction and so for the past four years no additional object has been discovered that's within the trajectory for the New Horizons to potentially

reach it now because the spacecraft is moving really fast and because it's moving away from Pluto according to these scientific calculations there is just enough fuel to maybe encounter something if it has a division of about 1 degree from the current trajectory so here the spacecraft can move just a little bit away from its trajectory and that object will have to cross the trajectory at some

point in the future but no additional discoveries have been made since 2019 and as the spacecraft moves farther and farther away the odds of finding something new are even lower and what's worse is that the scientists have been getting even less time on the telescope so their ability to find something calendar has decreased even more and so basically for them to continue the mission they have

to find something some kind of a additional object within the next year and a half or so but at the moment they don't believe they'll be able to do so which potentially jeopardizes the planetary mission for New Horizons and which also means that by 2025 it might switch to a completely different scientific mission in this case being heliophysics but the current project leader Allen Stern disagrees

and honestly he makes a pretty good point originally this mission was also intended to study the Kuiper belt and though we haven't found a lot of objects crossing the trajectory with the New Horizons it's actually still going to be in a Kuiper Belt until 2028 and it's literally the only Mission we're going to have in this belt for a pretty long time possibly ever we don't

even know when the next mission to the outer solar system is going to be launched and so shutting down the research on planetary objects and trying to switch this to a solar mission is maybe a little bit premature and that's even if they don't we discover any objects that can be studied in more detail just yet but more importantly there's actually another researcher that recently announced

something else exciting that can potentially give this Mission even more reason to exist this was part of the much wider discussion with other members of the mission but one of the Canadian researchers was Fraser recently made a very surprising and someone intriguing proposition based on new discoveries it actually does look like the solar system has two Kuiper ballots or technically binary Kuiper Belt as visible from

going to move through a region we will never visit it and never knew anything about mostly because compared to previous Pros like for example the Pioneer probes or the Voyager Pros New Horizons is really the only a mission that's pretty much on the plane of the solar system and is going to be flying directly through what could be another asteroid belt that we didn't really know

existed and though understandably maybe this is just a reason the scientists are trying to find for the mission to be extended and to exist further at the moment the data seems to suggest that they are not wrong at all there does seem to be a much higher number of objects slightly farther away and potentially several objects that could be close enough for the probe to see

them but it's not going to enter this region until late 2020s or even early 2030s and by then the nuclear fuel on the probe is actually going to start reaching the point where some of the instruments might have to reduce their operation in order to save energy but technically the probe is still going to be operational in 2040s and even 2050s sort of similar to what

happened to the Voyager pros and so at the moment it's actually a bit unclear what's going to happen to New Horizons or what NASA decides to do with it especially if the scientists behind this recent discovery might have really discovered a new structure within the solar system after all and though we might not actually see similar pictures to what you see right here the very detailed

pictures from erakov it is still possible especially if someone finds some kind of an object but they know existed that's moving in just the right way for the New Horizons to cross it at the moment though its future is a bit uncertain and though as I mentioned the mission is not going to get shut down it's just going to be repurposed for different scientific goals if

nothing does go through with it and changes this to a healing physics Mission and officially this is going to be seen as the end of New Horizons but I think it's still a little bit too early to tell what's going to happen because the discussion itself is far from finished and if by some chance we do find a planetary body on the way it's definitely going

to extend the mission by at least a few years although at least for now I guess we can assume that it's almost the end of New Horizons it definitely taught us a lot about Pluto it showed us a lot of pictures from different objects and even collected data from objects like Saturn and Jupiter but despite all of this there's a chance that by next year it

might be more or less finished and since we have no other mission to the outskirts of the solar system planned for anytime soon to some extent it can also be seen as a kind of an end of an error currently there is no plan for anything to be launched to for example Uranus Neptune or any other objects farther away and so it's really only New Horizons

that still is technically the most exciting planetary Mission we currently have it just doesn't really have any planets or objects to study right now but anyway once we'll learn more we'll definitely talk more about this in some of the future videos although I think the next video is definitely going to be about that second Kuiper ballad once the site is provide a little bit more information

and a little bit more evidence thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has running about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe some position on patreon by Julian Channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye-bye [Music] [Music] thank you foreign