The idea that we might take an active, working spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt and not only repurpose it for a different task (heliophysics) but also dismiss the team that is now running it is patently absurd. Yet this appears to be a possibility when it comes to New Horizons, the remarkable explorer of Pluto/Charon, Arrokoth, and the myriad objects of the Kuiper Belt. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, responding to a 2022 Senior Review panel which had praised New Horizons, is behind the controversy, about which you can read more in NASA’s New Horizons Mission Still Threatened.
So absurd is the notion that I’m going to assume this radical step, apparently aimed at ending the Kuiper Belt mission New Horizons was designed for on September 30 of 2024, will not happen, heartened by a recent letter of protest from some figures central to the space community, as listed in the above article from Universe Today. These are, among a total of 25 planetary scientists, past Planetary Society board chair Jim Bell, Lori Garver (past Deputy Administrator of NASA), Jim Green (Past Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division), Candice Hansen-Koharcheck (Past chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences and Past Chair of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group), author Homer Hickham, Wesley T. Huntress (Past Director of NASA’s solar system Exploration Group), astrophysicist Sir Brian May, and Melissa McGrath (past NASA official and AAS Chair of DPS).
Needless to say, we’ll keep a wary eye on the matter (and I’ve just signed the petition to save the original mission), but let’s talk this morning about what New Horizons is doing right now, as the science remains deeply productive. I like the way science team member Tod Lauer spoke of the spacecraft’s current position in a recent post on the team’s website, a place where “It’s still convenient to think of neat north and south hemispheres to organize our vista of the sky, but the equator is now defined by the band of the galaxy, not our spinning Earth, lost to us in the glare of the fading Sun.”
Places like that evoke the poet in all of us. Lauer points out that the New Horizons main telescope is no more powerful than what amateur stargazers willing to open their checkbooks might use in their backyards. Part of the beauty of the situation, though, is that New Horizons moves in a very dark place indeed. While I have vivid memories of seeing a glorious Milky Way bisecting the sky aboard a small boat one summer night on Lake George in the Adirondacks, how much more striking is the vantage out here in the Kuiper Belt where the nearest city lights are billions of kilometers away?
Image: A Kuiper Belt explorer looks into the galaxy. Credit: Serge Brunier/Marc Postman/Dan Durda
The science remains robust out here as well. Consider what Lauer notes in his article. Looking for Kuiper Belt objects using older images, the New Horizons team found that in all cases, even objects far from the Milky Way’s band appeared against a background brighter than scientists can explain, even factoring in the billions of galaxies that fill the visible cosmos. The puzzle isn’t readily solved. Says Lauer:
…we then tried observations of a test field carefully selected to be far away from the Milky Way, any bright stars, clouds of dust – or anything, anything that we could think of that would wash out the fragile darkness of the universe. The total background was much lower than that in our repurposed images of Kuiper Belt objects – but by exactly the amount we expected, given our care at pointing the spacecraft at just about the darkest part of the sky we could find. The mysterious glow is still there, and more undeniable, given the care we took to exclude anything that would compete with the darkness of the universe, itself. You’re in an empty house, far out in the country, on a clear moonless night. You turn off all the lights everywhere, but it’s still not completely dark. The billions of galaxies beyond our Milky Way are still there, but what we measure is twice as bright as all the light they’ve put out over all time since the Big Bang. There is something unknown shining light into our camera. If it’s the universe, then it’s just as strong, just as bright, as all the galaxies that ever were.
Only New Horizons can do this kind of work. How far are we from Earth? Take a look at the animated image below, which is about as vivid a reminder as I can find.
Image: Two images of Proxima Centauri, one taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe and the other by ground-based telescopes. The images show how the spacecraft’s view, from a distance of 7 billion kilometers, is very different from what we see on Earth, illustrating the parallax effect. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Las Cumbres Observatory/Siding Spring Observatory.
With 15 more dark fields slated for examination this summer, New Horizons remains active on this and many other fronts. In his latest PI’s Perspective, Alan Stern notes the eight-week period of observations taking place now and through September. include continued observations of KBOs, imaging of the ice giants, dust impact measurements, mapping of hydrogen gas in the outer heliosphere, analysis using the ultraviolet spectrometer to look for structures in the interstellar medium, and spatial variations in the visible wavelength background. Six months of data return will be needed to download the full set for the planetary, heliospheric and astrophysics communities.
According to Stern, new fault protection software will allow New Horizons to operate out to 100 AU. That assumes we’ll still be taking Kuiper Belt data. Given the utterly unique nature of this kind of dataset and the fact that this spacecraft is engaged in doing exactly what it was designed to do, it is beyond comprehension that its current mission might be threatened with a shakeup to the core team or a reframing of its investigations. I’ve come across the National Space Society’s petition to save the New Horizons Kuiper Belt mission late, but please take this chance to sign it.
Well……….
I sure hope this mission continues, I’ll be hoping for another flyby too if something is found.
How long is the spacecraft expected to last?
Cheers Edwn
If the background is brighter than expected, could it imply that the expansion of the universe is slower than figured?
I read somewhere long ago of speculation that an infinite universe should have the same density of light sources in all directions, and the darkness at night was a result of their recession due to the expansion of the universe.
But the universe isn’t infinite, so Olbers’ Paradox doesn’t apply. But yes, the redshift does result in a lower brightness too. Hoyle discussed the effect of various factors that affected the background brightness.
Sorry to be late to the party but I’ve been catching up. I must have missed something. When was it proved that the universe is not infinite?
The expansion rate is known pretty well these days, and does not affect the census of what sources we can actually see, which is the crucial step.
You might like this article:
Opinion | Is There a Crisis in Cosmology? – The New York Times
A puzzling decision. I’m wondering (guessing) that part of it might be the oversubscribing of the DSN? There may be a need to cut its commitments due to other priorities.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-mission-nearly-broke-the-deep-space-network/
Did Alan Stern upset somebody? Given the tiny funding compared to NASA’s budget (not to mention waste), this ruling seems more political/vindictive than rational.
The wider perspective is that cancellations during missions are a reminder that the “building cathedrals” mentality just does not apply anymore. The Catholic church was self-funding through tithes, not by the grace of some feudal lord taken from the tax take. Government funding and politics now play a role. Recall how the climate-change denial of the Republican party was used to [unsuccessfully?] scupper the replacement of the CO2 monitoring satellite. Conversely, the hugely expensive SLS has been kept going despite failures, cost overruns, and possible white elephant status, possibly indicating that the “sunk cost fallacy” is still invoked, especially if it is a politically important pork project. The number of NASA programs that were started and abandoned, of ideas promoted yet left on the proverbial “drawing boards” is remarkable. It is approaching 40 years since the first proposed date for a Mars landing has lapsed.
What about the impact on scientific research? If a scientist knew that a mission with a long-term mission would likely be canceled before important results could be returned, does this not reduce the probability of committing to a project?
NASA spends the bulk of its funding on human spaceflight. Currently maintaining the ISS and developing the Artemis Moon missions. Despite the generated hoopla with the more photogenic astronauts, does the ISS generate much new knowledge or extend human capabilities in space?
The continuing New Horizons mission costs are like loose pocket change in comparison. Surely NASA can find the needed funding for this mission in between the sofa cushions? What is the real story behind this announcement?
SLS is going to give us an interstellar probe…while Starship looks to give us explosions
Keystone Scientists armed with power and a hearty inferiority complex should never be allowed to have power over the works of world-renowned scientists. Seems elementary, in fact.
I know this might disturb some but I have to take direct aim at NASA’s manned space program. Is Artemis a program? What is the launch cadence? Is it less than one flight per year as it seems to be? What is the purpose of such a program? Surely NASA could have evaluated and terminated this project years ago. It is years behind and billions off budget. A smaller, cheaper and probably more effective, efficient program would have left far more money for other projects such as New Horizons. Looking into Artemis is a disturbing journey into government pork given out to all 50 states to keep the congressional voters happy.
It’s not obvious to me why it is absurd to change the mission and save money. Please explain. Thanks.
New Horizons was designed as an outer system explorer, its instruments tuned for exactly that purpose. If it is turned solely to heliophysics, it will be doing work it is only partially optimized for. It will also be neglecting work that only it can do, given that it is our only presence in the Kuiper Belt. In addition, changing the mission by removing the flight team costs us all the experience of that team, a waste of a priceless resource. This is bureaucratic bungling in action; let’s hope it fails to gain traction.
Do we know if Stern’s team were still searching for an additional last-minute fly-by target?
Yes, that search continues.
Yes, the search for an additional fly-by target has been thorough, but still continues.
Whatever the decision, it needs to be a cold hard scientific decision about the best value for the information gained and not a political or emotional one.
Read the linked essay. It’s absurd to terminate a unique opportunity to make fundamental discoveries about the Universe for a little pocket change. In this case what is penny-wise is pound foolish.
In any hierarchy, the furrher away from the individual missions, the less the committment to those missions. This is particularly true when the upper echelons are lacking in a vision for the overall mission and of the role of those individual missions.
And as long as blindly harnessing the public’s curiosity and enthusiasm is a driving force, discretion and judgement may continue to be sadly wanting..
Just wondering if lensing events of background stars is possible, it would allow us to pin down the mass of proxima more exactly and it’s orbit around alpha centauri. Perhaps if say used on betelgeuse could it yield a better distance to it and solve it’s mass question. New horizons does give us a huge parallax base for more accurate distance measurments which would be squandered if shut down. I am not sure if it could yield dark matter distributions locally but it could be asking to much.
New Horizons is not that good for parallaxes (despite the fact that I was the lead of the Proxima and Wolf 359 NH parallax program). It was a great demo, but for accuracy, Gaia and HST do vastly better. Microlensing for any given star is extremely unlikely, and you wouldn’t use NH for that. Any ground telescope would suffice.
As far as I am aware Gaia struggles with some Stellar types and the nearest stars are too bright for its optics.
It would be good for searching for a Earth-like Planet in the Distant Kuiper Belt because the parallax would be huge! A good AI program would be able to find it…
An article about the proposed SLS-launched Interstellar Probe ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/proposed-interstellar-mission-reaches-for-the-stars-one-generation-at-a-time1/ ) details the need for “handing off leadership from one generation to the next” and ensuring “the hard-won operational knowledge of one generation is passed on to the next”. Does the current controversy provide any insight into how that should best be done?
Let’s hope we can extract some insights like that. Right now the whole imbroglio seems more like a case of illustrating what must not be done.
It might seem that transmitting cultural (to include social, political, “religious/spiritual”⇔ moral/ethical, et cetera) values from one generation to the next is becoming problematic; “leadership” which rests on those foundations will face even greater peril in the transition.
Many great ones stood on the shoulders of preceding giants: future cathedrals depend on today’s transitions. Such transitions are de rigueur in all walks of life.
Just one more comment about NASA’s manned space program I think is relevant here. I think part of the reason that NASA allowed the Artemis launch cadence to be so slow is the presence of Starship at SpaceEx. Starship will provide much of the lift capacity to reach the moon with large payloads and in fact I think it is Starship that has been chosen to land US astronauts on the moon. This allows NASA to launch Artemis once a year or less while still putting Americans (and others) back on the moon in a couple of years or so. This doesn’t make it ok in my view to spend wildly inappropriate amounts of money on a launch system (SLS) that is a dinosaur by comparison to Starship. And this wild overspending of precious taxpayer money may be why other non-manned programs are under threat.
I think NASA suffers for bureaucratic sclerosis. Back then the Orion capsule was being designed, it was claimed that they could build a new, larger version of the Apollo capsule very quickly. That didn’t happen and it cost much more than expected and took longer than expected despite the claims it would be faster.
The new spacesuits also proved a debacle, delaying the possible date of the Moon landing. Ultimately, I think the work was farmed out to another company (Axiom?).
This is not just a NASA problem either. Boeing seems unable to deliver a quality product, whether aircraft or rockets, but this seems to be a result of management cost-cutting and worrying more about financial targets than engineering.
I may be wrong, but I think that when NASA’s budget needs are not fully met by Congress, the crewed missions and related hardware development take priority over the science missions. I am sure this isn’t arbitrary but may be a result of needing to try to meet hard deadlines. If the budget is squeezed, you cannot just tell the crew on the ISS that they cannot return as scheduled but have to stay in orbit longer instead of being relieved by a new crew.