'The Entirety of The USA History Happened Within Just One Pluto Orbit'
https://starlust.org/the-entirety-of-th … uto-orbit/
Thanks for the link to the detailed report on the issues of NASA funding for planetary missions. Alan Stern is trying to keep his team together, on the slight chance a meaningful object might lie in the path of the probe as it travels through the Kuiper belt. The difficulty seems to be competition between Stern and other science teams funded by NASA.
The James Webb might be able to look ahead of New Horizons, but competition for ** that ** resource is stiff. Objects out that far tend to be poorly illuminated and not very reflective, so finding them is best done by watching for occlusion of distant stars, but ** that ** requires a ** lot ** of telescope time.
The strongest argument Stern has going for his team is the fact that New Horizons is already "on site".
(th)
]]>New Horizons remains healthy and continues to send valuable data from deep in the Kuiper Belt - more than 5 billion miles away - even as it speeds farther and farther from the Earth and Sun.
Of course the flyby targets in the Pluto system and at the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Arrokoth, other KBOs and dwarf planets has furthered our knowledge of our solar system.
Scientists want NASA to extend New Horizons funding and operations across 2023-2025 years but who knows if that will happen.
]]>I wonder if they would point the camera back to get a glimpse of just how small our world is....
I also hope that there will be more to come.....as it speeds away to points unknown...
]]>All in all, the Chinese have pulled off a feat that is quite worthy. Congrats to them. Bravo!
GW
]]>You'll detect a criticism there, and you'll be right.
We will learn vastly more about the solar system if set up bases on the Moon and Mars. The fact that NASA has failed to do so, has been one of the great historical failures, along with China's decision to abandon exploration of the globe with its "super-junks".
From Wikipedia:
"From 1405 to 1433, large fleets commanded by Admiral Zheng He – under the auspices of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty – traveled to the Indian Ocean seven times. This attempt did not lead China to global expansion, as the Confucian bureaucracy under the next emperor reversed the policy of open exploration and by 1500, it became a capital offence to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts."
Not unlike NASA's prohibition on human colonisation from the mid 1970s till now.
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