Whoosh ! Did you see that ? It may look a number scrappy , but the tiny white projectile at the center of the animation below — formally call 1994 JR1 — is a cosmic sentence capsule , brought to you by a pianoforte - sized spacecraft over 3 billion miles off . You ’re look at the close characterisation yet of a Kuiper Belt Object ( KBO ) by a gene of at least 15 .
The brio consists of four frames fascinate by the New Horizons spacecraft ’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager ( LORRI ) on November 2nd . Spaced an hour apart , the figure of speech show the 90 mile ( 150 km)-wide KBO cognize as 1994 JR1 sailing through the void against a background of stars some 3.3 billion miles ( 5.3 billion km ) from the Sun . New Horizons captured the prospect from a length of only 170 million mile ( 280 million klick ) .
It ’s a pocket-sized penchant of what ’s to come if NASA approves an extended mission for New Horizons to explore the cosmic Bad Lands beyond Pluto . The Kuiper Belt is a vast hoop of icy rock ; primordial fabric that has n’t vary much since the formation of the Solar System . By studying Kuiper belt object , uranologist can peer deeply into past times and memorize what conditions were like when the very first planets were coalescing around our star .
After aseries of engine burnslast month , New Horizons is currently on form for a stuffy flyby of 2014 MU69 , another KBO , on January 1st , 2019 .
[ New Horizons ]
AstronomyNASANew HorizonsSolar SystemSpace
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