Latest news with #AlanStern
News18
21-07-2025
- Science
- News18
What If The Sun Simply Stopped Shining One Day?
If the sun suddenly went out, Earth would freeze, life would perish, and the solar system would unravel, but humanity might have left long before that day What if, one day, the sun simply stopped shining? It sounds like a strange question, but would everything truly come to an end if that happened? Would Earth perish? Could astronauts in space survive? And would our entire solar system cease to exist? A report by Live Science explores these questions, and the answers might surprise you. The Sun: Heart Of The Solar System The sun is far more than just a star providing light and warmth. It sits at the centre of our solar system, and its gravitational pull keeps all the planets, including Earth, in orbit. The sun has been burning for around 4.6 billion years and is expected to continue for another five billion years or so. However, when its hydrogen fuel finally runs out, the solar system as we know it will begin to unravel. The Slow Death Of The Sun The sun's extinction will be a gradual process. It will first swell into a Red Giant, engulfing planets such as Mercury and Venus. Earth may be consumed as well, but even if it escapes this fate, life on the surface will be wiped out. Without the sun's heat and light, Earth will plunge into eternal ice and darkness. The Aftermath On Earth And Beyond Astronauts trapped aboard space stations would face a dire fate, with no energy or oxygen to sustain them. The sun's gravitational hold will weaken and eventually vanish, causing planets to drift aimlessly, leading to collisions and fragmentation across the cosmos. A Frozen Solar System Ultimately, the sun will shrink into a small, dense, cold sphere, a white dwarf, leaving behind a frozen solar system graveyard. Some gas giants, like Jupiter, and distant objects from the Oort Cloud may still orbit this remnant, but life as we know it will be long gone. According to astronomer Alan Stern, this marks the end of our solar system, though not a final termination since the universe's end is an ongoing process, not a fixed moment. Over billions of years, rare cosmic events, such as a passing supernova or the gravitational influence of another star, could further scatter the remnants of the solar system. Some scientists even predict that fundamental particles, like protons, may eventually decay. What About Humanity? As for humans, we would likely have left Earth long before the sun's death. We might have colonised another planet, or possibly ceased to exist altogether. Should a descendant of humanity gaze upon the cold, dark solar system, they would see only relics of a distant past; the ashes of a once-blazing sun and a handful of planets drifting silently in orbit. Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Forbes
28-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
White House Aims To Halt NASA Missions Across The Solar System
The New Horizons spacecraft sends back its sensational snapshots of Jupiter, and its volcanic moon ... More Io, before the mission's close encounter with Pluto (Photo by: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Universal Images Group via Getty Images The Trump administration's bid to terminate NASA's leading-edge flights of exploration 'across the solar system' may cripple American leadership in space, preventing discoveries that could reshape civilization in what is now considered the first Space Age, says one of the world's top planetary scientists. As space powers across the continents vie to map and image planets and moons, comets and ice-worlds circling the sun, slashes to NASA's funding would represent a great leap backward, crippling it even as rivals race ahead, says Alan Stern, a one-time leader at NASA and a globally acclaimed space scientist. The president's new proposed budget drastically cuts appropriations for NASA, with outlays for its planetary science missions—the exploration of Pluto and other celestial worlds by space-borne rockets and robots, cameras and telescopes—axed almost in half. Now facing the guillotine—inexplicably—are constellations of technologically advanced space probes developed by NASA and spearheading scientists across America, including the Juno imager now orbiting Jupiter, the Mars Odyssey and Maven spacecraft gliding above Mars and the asteroid hunter OSIRIS-Apophis. NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, is one of the leading-edge explorers slated to ... More be terminated by the White House. Shown here is an artist's impression of the orbiter. (Photo) Getty Images 'Incredibly, this budget proposes to turn off 55 perfectly working, productive spacecraft across the solar system,' Dr. Stern, who once headed NASA's Science Mission Directorate, tells me in an interview. Stern took up that post after conceiving and designing one of the American space agency's most sensational missions ever - the New Horizons spacecraft that aced a close approach with Pluto while sending back fantastical images of the otherworldly orb and its moons - a miniature planetary system that generated billions of hits when it began beaming down across NASA's website. While New Horizons continues its super-speed flight through the outer solar system, charting the mysterious frozen reaches of the Kuiper belt, the president's plan calls for the spacecraft to be cast away. Abandoning the $900-million mission in order to recoup the minimal costs of its ongoing operation makes no sense economically or scientifically, Stern says. The robotic photographer New Horizons images Pluto as it speeds through the outer solar system ... More (Photo by NASA/APL/SwRI via Getty Images) Getty Images 'With New Horizons,' he says, 'there are a lot of important scientific objectives still ahead, things no other spacecraft can do.' 'Terminating this mission would also represent a tragic loss of soft power projection for the U.S.' The Horizons craft, and its array of next-generation cameras and spectrometers, is exploring a region beyond Pluto that no other human-created probe has ever entered, with a treasure trove of potential discoveries waiting. 'This would be like sending a message to [Christopher] Columbus to sink his ships while they were in North America,' Stern tells me, upending a new age of discovery. 'With New Horizons, we have the power and the fuel to run this mission for another 20 years … and we have more Kuiper belt objects to explore.' The White House, in issuing its slashed budget plan for NASA, never provided a logical rationale for torpedoing some of the agency's world-leading missions to survey and image the solar system. Its inscrutable sinking of some of these vanguard voyages was unveiled with the terseness of a telegram: 'Operating missions that have completed their prime missions (New Horizons and Juno) and the follow-on mission to OSIRIX-REx, OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer, are eliminated.' The asteroid-hunter OSIRIS spacecraft, shown here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is one of ... More the trailblazers set to be terminated by the White House. (Photo by Bruce Weaver / AFP) (Photo by BRUCE WEAVER/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images The OSIRIS spacecraft, which had been slated to rendezvous with the closely approaching Apophis asteroid ahead, is a precursor mission to defending the Earth's eight billion citizens against doomsday cosmic strikes by colossal comets or asteroids of the future. The robotic photographer Juno has snapped an endless kaleidoscope of imagery as it floats around Jupiter. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have posted raw impressions of the orb and its moons and invited 'citizen scientists' to Photoshop and launch them across the cybersphere. In the process, they are becoming part of the spacefaring civilization that is spreading out across the globe. Model of the $1-billion Juno spacecraft, which is now orbiting and photographing Jupiter (Photo by ... More) Getty Images During its own space odyssey, New Horizons has astounded stargazers, students and scholars worldwide with its technicolor panoramas of Pluto, covered in surreal ice-fields and cryo-volcanoes, and its age-old companion Charon. The twin netherworlds—named after the mythical Greek god of the underworld and the pilot who shuttled souls across the river Styx—circle more than five billion kilometers distant from the sun, along an orbit that Stern's Pluto expedition took nine years to reach. Now, even as it whizzes beyond all of the classical planets, New Horizons, and its future, has entered the purgatory of potential excommunication by mission controllers—and their masters—six worlds away. The New Horizons spacecraft, now speeding through the outer solar system, could be jettisoned under ... More a White House plan that would destroy American leadership in planetary science missions. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images) Heritage Images via Getty Images 'This is a vast and tragic mistake,' Stern says, 'because the issue is larger than just NASA, it also affects U.S. world leadership [and] responsible government that protects taxpayers from waste like this.' The administration's crash-and-burn dismissal of the solar system's trailblazing robotic discoverers has triggered trepidation across NASA, whose ranks of pioneering scientists are likewise set to be culled. Within NASA, Alan Stern is a pole star of cutting-edge exploration, helping guide more than two dozen missions. After his New Horizons spacecraft rendezvoused with Pluto, the agency bestowed its highest honor on him - the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. 'Stern led the team that returned remarkable imagery and other data from the Pluto system last summer, generating headlines worldwide and setting a record for the farthest world ever explored,' NASA's leaders said. "New Horizons represents the best of humanity and reminds us of why we explore,' added Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science. "The first flyby of Pluto is a remarkable achievement.' Being given the chance to lead the close encounter with Pluto, Stern said on accepting the award, 'has been the greatest honor of my lifetime.' Around the same time, NASA film-makers paid tribute to Stern, his 2000+ Pluto mission colleagues, and the target of their interplanetary expedition in the captivating documentary ' The Year of Pluto .' Stern has himself chronicled his trek across the twilight reaches of the star system in a series of fascinating books, including Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System and Chasing New Horizons, and in a torrent of acclaimed papers . Scholar Stern predicts that if the White House's proposed death sentence for flotillas of pathfinding space missions is actually carried out, that would mark the decline and fall of NASA's planetary science breakthroughs, and the comparative rise of its competitors in the renewed space race of the 2020s. If NASA's funding and inter-planet journeys are decimated, he tells me, 'These cuts will absolutely destroy U.S. leadership in all the space sciences.' 'This is tragically misguided.' The potential death knell for an armada of space discovery missions has been reverberating not just across NASA, but also throughout the U.S. universities that help conceive or design these flights. 'Certainly termination of the New Horizons mission would be terrible,' says Kip Hodges , who as founding director of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration helped transform the university into one of the top American space studies centers. 'This a real frontier mission at this point,' he tells me in an interview, 'delivering important new information about distant parts of our Sun's heliosphere.' Congress has the power to save NASA and its leading-edge robotic explorers across the solar system ... More (Illustration by Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images) Future Publishing via Getty Images Professor Hodges , one of the top space scholars in the U.S., predicts that the Swords of Damocles now hanging above New Horizons and other new-frontier flights could still be lifted. If the White House plan to cut away at NASA and its revolutionary planetary scouting missions were enacted as is, he predicts, 'a great many folks in industry, the NASA labs, and academia will be disappointed.' Yet he adds that 'the budget for NASA evolves over several stages,' with the president's initial proposal just one of competing models—one that could be rejected as the Senate and House of Representatives look afresh at NASA's missions, goals and funding. After the twin chambers reach a consensus on reshaping NASA for the next phase of its evolution, Professor Hodges adds, 'Quite often, the appropriated budget is not the president's budget.' That means space aficionados across America who seek to overturn the president's capital sentence on NASA's boundary-breaking missions have a clear channel of recourse, Stern says. Would-be petitioners for a reprieve, he advises, 'should contact their elected representatives in Congress and tell them this is a huge mistake.'
Forbes
22-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
White House Aims To Halt Fantastical NASA Missions Across Solar System
The New Horizons spacecraft sends back its sensational snapshots of Jupiter, and its volcanic moon ... More Io, before the mission's close encounter with Pluto (Photo by: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Universal Images Group via Getty Images The White House bid to terminate NASA's leading-edge flights of exploration 'across the solar system' threatens to explode American leadership in discoveries that have reshaped civilization since the rise of the first Space Age, says one of the world's top planetary scientists. As space powers across the continents vie to map and image planets and moons, comets and ice-worlds circling the sun, slashes to NASA's funding would represent a great leap backward, crippling it even as rivals race ahead, says Alan Stern, a one-time leader at NASA and a globally acclaimed space scientist. The president's new proposed budget drastically cuts appropriations for NASA, with outlays for its planetary science missions—the exploration of Pluto and other celestial worlds by space-borne rockets and robots, cameras and telescopes—axed almost in half. Now facing the guillotine—inexplicably—are constellations of technologically advanced space probes developed by NASA and spearheading scientists across America, including the Juno imager now orbiting Jupiter, the Mars Odyssey and Maven spacecraft gliding above Mars and the asteroid hunter OSIRIS-Apophis. NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, is one of the leading-edge explorers slated to ... More be terminated by the White House. Shown here is an artist's impression of the orbiter. (Photo) Getty Images 'Incredibly, this budget proposes to turn off 55 perfectly working, productive spacecraft across the solar system,' Dr. Stern, who once headed NASA's Science Mission Directorate, tells me in an interview. Stern took up that post after conceiving and designing one of the American space agency's most sensational missions ever - the New Horizons spacecraft that aced a close approach with Pluto while sending back fantastical images of the otherworldly orb and its moons - a miniature planetary system that generated billions of hits when it began beaming down across NASA's website. While New Horizons continues its super-speed flight through the outer solar system, charting the mysterious frozen reaches of the Kuiper belt, the president's plan calls for the spacecraft to be cast away. Abandoning the $900-million mission in order to recoup the minimal costs of its ongoing operation makes no sense economically or scientifically, Stern says. The robotic photographer New Horizons images Pluto as it speeds through the outer solar system ... More (Photo by NASA/APL/SwRI via Getty Images) Getty Images 'With New Horizons,' he says, 'there are a lot of important scientific objectives still ahead, things no other spacecraft can do.' 'Terminating this mission would also represent a tragic loss of soft power projection for the U.S.' The Horizons craft, and its array of next-generation cameras and spectrometers, is exploring a region beyond Pluto that no other human-created probe has ever entered, with a treasure trove of potential discoveries waiting. 'This would be like sending a message to [Christopher] Columbus to sink his ships while they were in North America,' Stern tells me, upending a new age of discovery. 'With New Horizons, we have the power and the fuel to run this mission for another 20 years … and we have more Kuiper belt objects to explore.' The White House, in issuing its slashed budget plan for NASA, never provided a logical rationale for torpedoing some of the agency's world-leading missions to survey and image the solar system. Its inscrutable sinking of some of these vanguard voyages was unveiled with the terseness of a telegram: 'Operating missions that have completed their prime missions (New Horizons and Juno) and the follow-on mission to OSIRIX-REx, OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer, are eliminated.' The asteroid-hunter OSIRIS spacecraft, shown here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is one of ... More the trailblazers set to be terminated by the White House. (Photo by Bruce Weaver / AFP) (Photo by BRUCE WEAVER/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images The OSIRIS spacecraft, which had been slated to rendezvous with the closely approaching Apophis asteroid ahead, is a precursor mission to defending the Earth's eight billion citizens against doomsday cosmic strikes by colossal comets or asteroids of the future. The robotic photographer Juno has snapped an endless kaleidoscope of imagery as it floats around Jupiter. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have posted raw impressions of the orb and its moons and invited 'citizen scientists' to Photoshop and launch them across the cybersphere. In the process, they are becoming part of the spacefaring civilization that is spreading out across the globe. Model of the $1-billion Juno spacecraft, which is now orbiting and photographing Jupiter (Photo by ... More) Getty Images During its own space odyssey, New Horizons has astounded stargazers, students and scholars worldwide with its technicolor panoramas of Pluto, covered in surreal ice-fields and cryo-volcanoes, and its age-old companion Charon. The twin netherworlds—named after the mythical Greek god of the underworld and the pilot who shuttled souls across the river Styx—circle more than five billion kilometers distant from the sun, along an orbit that Stern's Pluto expedition took nine years to reach. Now, even as it whizzes beyond all of the classical planets, New Horizons, and its future, has entered the purgatory of potential excommunication by mission controllers—and their masters—six worlds away. The New Horizons spacecraft, now speeding through the outer solar system, could be jettisoned under ... More a White House plan that would destroy American leadership in planetary science missions. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images) Heritage Images via Getty Images 'This is a vast and tragic mistake,' Stern says, 'because the issue is larger than just NASA, it also affects U.S. world leadership [and] responsible government that protects taxpayers from waste like this.' The administration's crash-and-burn dismissal of the solar system's trailblazing robotic discoverers has triggered trepidation across NASA, whose ranks of pioneering scientists are likewise set to be culled. Within NASA, Alan Stern is a pole star of cutting-edge exploration, helping guide more than two dozen missions. After his New Horizons spacecraft rendezvoused with Pluto, the agency bestowed its highest honor on him - the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. 'Stern led the team that returned remarkable imagery and other data from the Pluto system last summer, generating headlines worldwide and setting a record for the farthest world ever explored,' NASA's leaders said. "New Horizons represents the best of humanity and reminds us of why we explore,' added Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science. "The first flyby of Pluto is a remarkable achievement.' Being given the chance to lead the close encounter with Pluto, Stern said on accepting the award, 'has been the greatest honor of my lifetime.' Around the same time, NASA film-makers paid tribute to Stern, his 2000+ Pluto mission colleagues, and the target of their interplanetary expedition in the captivating documentary ' The Year of Pluto .' Stern has himself chronicled his trek across the twilight reaches of the star system in a stream of fascinating books, including Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System and Chasing New Horizons, and in a torrent of acclaimed papers . Scholar Stern predicts that if the White House's proposed death sentence for flotillas of pathfinding space missions is actually carried out, that would mark the decline and fall of NASA's planetary science breakthroughs, and the comparative rise of its competitors in the renewed space race of the 2020s. If NASA's funding and inter-planet journeys are decimated, he tells me, 'These cuts will absolutely destroy U.S. leadership in all the space sciences.' 'This is tragically misguided.' The potential death knell for an armada of space discovery missions has been reverberating not just across NASA, but also throughout the U.S. universities that help conceive or design these flights. 'Certainly termination of the New Horizons mission would be terrible,' says Kip Hodges , who as founding director of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration helped transform the university into one of the top American space studies centers. 'This a real frontier mission at this point,' he tells me in an interview, 'delivering important new information about distant parts of our Sun's heliosphere.' Congress has the power to save NASA and its leading-edge robotic explorers across the solar system ... More (Illustration by Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images) Future Publishing via Getty Images Professor Hodges , one of the top space scholars in the U.S., predicts that the Swords of Damocles now hanging above New Horizons and other new-frontier flights could still be lifted. If the White House plan to cut away at NASA and its revolutionary planetary scouting missions were enacted as is, he predicts, 'a great many folks in industry, the NASA labs, and academia will be disappointed.' Yet he adds that 'the budget for NASA evolves over several stages,' with the president's initial proposal just one of competing models—one that could be rejected as the Senate and House of Representatives look afresh at NASA's missions, goals and funding. After the twin chambers reach a consensus on reshaping NASA for the next phase of its evolution, Professor Hodges adds, 'Quite often, the appropriated budget is not the president's budget.' That means space aficionados across America who seek to overturn the president's capital sentence on NASA's boundary-breaking missions have a clear channel of recourse, Stern says. Would-be petitioners for a reprieve, he advises, 'should contact their elected representatives in Congress and tell them this is a huge mistake.'
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Space photo of the day for April 30, 2025
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A new study from the NASA New Horizons mission team at the Southwest Research Institute have resulted in a first-of-its-type map from the Milky Way galaxy in an ultraviolet wavelength, revealing details in the region around our solar system. This spectrograph map, generated from data collected by NASA's New Horizons probe, depicts the relatively uniform brightness of the ultraviolet (UV) "Lyman-alpha" background surrounding the sun and its area of influence."Understanding the Lyman-alpha background helps shed light on nearby galactic structures and processes," said Dr. Randy Gladstone with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado. "This research suggests that hot interstellar gas bubbles like the one our solar system is embedded within may actually be regions of enhanced hydrogen gas emissions at a wavelength called Lyman alpha." Lyman-alpha is a specific wavelength of UV light emitted and scattered by hydrogen atoms. It is useful when studying distant stars, galaxies and the interstellar medium, as it can help detect the composition, temperature and movement of these distant this spectrograph map, the black dots represent approximately 90,000 known UV-bright stars in our galaxy. New Horizons, which began as the first mission to flyby Pluto, collected baseline data about Lyman-alpha emissions during its initial journey to the small, icy world. After the spacecraft's primary objectives at Pluto were completed, New Horizons' ultraviolet spectrograph (named "Alice") was used to make more frequent surveys of Lyman-alpha emissions as New Horizons traveled farther from the sun. These observations included an extensive set of scans in 2023 that mapped roughly 83% of the sky. Before this map was released, scientists theorized that a wall of interstellar hydrogen atoms would accumulate as they reached the edge of our heliosphere — the region of our galaxy where the solar wind from our sun reaches and interacts with the interstellar medium. New Horizons data saw nothing to indicate that this "wall" was an important source of Lyman-alpha emissions."These are really landmark observations, in giving the first clear view of the sky surrounding the solar system at these wavelengths, both revealing new characteristics of that sky and refuting older ideas that the Alice New Horizons data just doesn't support," said Dr. Alan Stern. the mission's principal investigator at SwRI. "This Lyman-alpha map also provides a solid foundation for future investigations to learn even more." Read more about New Horizons' mission after leaving Pluto and other recent research based on Lyman-alpha emissions. You can also find the scientific paper describing the SwRI map and its findings in The Astronomical Journal.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Leaving Pluto in the dust: New Horizons probe gearing up for epic crossing of 'termination shock'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft conducted the first and only flyby of the Pluto system, culminating at the closest approach of that distant world in July 2015. Sailing onward, the probe carried out a Jan. 1, 2019 flyby of Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt Object, or KBO, located in a region of space beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. There are scads of other icy worlds residing in the Kuiper Belt, celestial leftovers from the formation of our solar system. For New Horizons, the gathering of more exploration science is, pun intended, on the horizon. Late last year, a study by the U.S. National Academies titled "The Next Decade of Discovery in Solar and Space Physics: Exploring and Safeguarding Humanity's Home in Space" observed that "key challenges are to keep receiving the invaluable observations from the New Horizons and Voyager spacecraft, which are the only means to gain firsthand knowledge of the environment in the outer heliosphere and outside the heliospheric bubble." Related: New Horizons: Exploring Pluto and beyond That report also noted that "moving outward, the boundary of the solar system where the sun's influence wanes and is replaced by the interstellar environment, there is much to be discovered." The heliospheric decadal report is important for several reasons, said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado."It's a completely independent validation by the community about how important and unique the New Horizons science is to that field," he told New Horizons is gearing up to cross the sun's "termination shock," Stern said, where the subsonic solar wind slows down and becomes subsonic as it rams into the interstellar medium. Related: New Horizons Pluto probe notches 3 new discoveries in outer solar system Though New Horizons is now in hibernation mode, the spacecraft is still collecting heliophysics data around the clock, Stern said, squirreling that data into onboard solid state memory — basically a big flash drive. "We went into hibernation mode on October 3 of last year. We exit that mode on April 2 of this year. When we wake up, we'll transmit the backlogged New Horizons data down to NASA's Deep Space Network," said Stern. "But actual crossing of the termination shock, the timing is a guessing game. No one can fully predict that, but it could potentially be as early as 2027 … and we want to be on guard then so we don't miss it," Stern noted. Meanwhile, New Horizons is in perfect health. "There's nothing broken on the spacecraft and the seven instruments that it's carrying," he added. "They are working super-well, as well as when they were launched." Related: New Horizons Pluto probe notches 3 new discoveries in outer solar system But New Horizons is low on propellant. "And that just means we have to be miserly with that fuel. Any fuel we spend is not going to get us to a new flyby of a KBO, so it reduces the odds of a flyby," said Stern. Being tight on fuel means that Stern has adopted a new title to go along with principal investigator: "Fuel hoarder in chief." Regarding the spacecraft's power and data transmission, the long-distance craft is good to go. Its nuclear power generating system will perhaps last into 2050, Stern advised. So, could New Horizons perform a flyby of another far-flung KBO? Possibly, if the mission gets some help from Earth-based observatories, particularly the soon-to-come online Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Rubin's detection of KBOs along an attainable New Horizons flight path would "significantly raise the odds of getting a flyby," Stern added. "But it's a needle in the haystack search," he added, "even using the world's best tools." Related: Just how dark is the universe? NASA's New Horizons probe gives us best estimate yet Meanwhile, a New Horizons heliophysics team consisting of about a dozen scientists and engineers are intently focused on spacecraft measurements taken in the outer heliosphere, said Andrew Poppe of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a co-investigator and heliophysics science lead on the New Horizons mission. That team is gearing up for New Horizons' crossing of the termination shock, one of the key outer boundaries between our heliosphere and interstellar space, Poppe told "Both Voyager spacecraft crossed this boundary and revealed a wealth of new physics," he said. "However, due to certain limitations in the Voyager instrumentation, key questions regarding a population of ions known as 'pickup ions' were left unanswered." Poppe added that, since the Voyager measurements, it has become increasingly clear that these pickup ions may in fact dominate the transfer of energy and momentum across the termination shock. Fortunately, New Horizons carries key instrumentation — the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) and Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) — that will conduct the first-ever measurements of these critical pickup ions in the outer heliosphere and across the termination shock. "With this in mind, the New Horizons heliophysics team has been planning out specific instrument observing modes, planning data downlink budgets (no easy feat from 60-plus astronomical units!), and engaging the broader outer heliospheric theoretical community to prepare for the groundbreaking measurements that New Horizons will return in the near future," Poppe said. Overall, the New Horizons team is humbled to follow in the footsteps of Voyager, said Poppe, "but extraordinarily excited to contribute first-of-a-kind measurements of the outer boundaries of the heliosphere we call 'home.'" The crossing of the termination shock itself could be as short as 10 minutes, said Pontus Brandt, the New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. "But there will likely be multiple crossings as the shock moves back and forth over the spacecraft for multiple days and surely will be another historic encounter for New Horizons," said Brandt. "The data from the termination shock encounter will be a treasure trove for space physicists worldwide who are eager to understand how this vast boundary works," Brandt told "All these discoveries from pioneering missions like Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what lies beyond, and pave the way for a future dedicated Interstellar Probe mission," he said. Brandt underscored another possible New Horizons exploration bonus. "I think we may have only seen the tip of the iceberg of the Kuiper Belt, which could be much more extended than we ever could imagine," Brandt said. "Dust hits measured by the spacecraft just keep being elevated, defying all our expectations of a 'Kuiper Cliff.' One must always give oneself the opportunity of discovery," Brandt added, "the essence of exploration." In a few years, New Horizons could very well find itself in the midst of a new region of the Kuiper Belt, Brandt suggested. That would be "a historic opportunity for planetary science with important implications for understanding exoplanetary systems." RELATED STORIES: — NASA images Uranus with epic team up of Hubble Telescope and New Horizons Pluto probe — NASA celebrates New Horizons' historic Pluto flyby in 2015 with awesome new videos — Far beyond Pluto: What's next for NASA's New Horizons probe? As a "first responder" and record title holder of a spacecraft, New Horizons has already chalked up history-making observations as the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and its moons up close. Also, after a nine-year journey, the probe passed its second major science target, zipping by the KBO Arrokoth in 2019, the most distant object ever inspected up close. New Horizons' findings are taking center stage at an upcoming 10th anniversary of the Pluto flyby science meeting now being planned for this July at APL, which designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA. "We're pulling together everything that has been learned since the flyby of New Horizons. And not just from the spacecraft, but also from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and from Earth-based observations, too," Stern said. "So stand by. I'm betting on some new surprises!"
