New Horizons successfully accomplished its exploration of Pluto and now, after its mission to the dwarf planet, what is next for the spacecraft?
The probe is still exploring the Kuiper Belt past Pluto, according to NASA. There is still plenty of space debris that scientists would like to learn more from, and that will be New Horizons' focus for the next years, or until it runs out of fuel and power.
"We have a chance to go further and explore the deep reaches of the heliosphere, like Voyager did, and to do that with much more modern instruments," said Alan Stern, the principal investigator for New Horizons mission, via USA Today. "Hopefully [it will] return data that will really add to the storehouse of what we know about our environment in the solar system."
However, roughly a year from now, the spacecraft is expected to join four other spaceships launched several decades ago: Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. All these are unmanned and are on their way into the farthest depths of the solar system, according to McClatchy DC.
Pioneer 10 went to space in 1972 to check out Jupiter and last signaled Earth in 2003. Pioneer 11 was launched one year after Pioneer 10 to head off to Saturn. It last sent its last signals to NASA in 1995. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to interstellar space in 1977. NASA confirmed that both Pioneer spacecrafts are now dead, but both Voyagers are still transmitting and signaling the space station. However, they are losing power fast.
"We're slowly turning off things to reduce the electrical demand so the power we do have is used for the critical systems," said Randii Wessen, NASA's spokesperson, via Phys Org. "But what are you going to run out of first? We're saying 2020-2025 is when we're going to lose them."
Eventually, like Pioneers, the Voyager spacecrafts and New Horizons will drift off, die in space and stop communicating with NASA. From that point, the space agency said that the spacecraft will be regarded as ambassadors of the Earth.
"They're ambassadors in the sense that they're our eyes and ears going places where we as a species can't go," Wessen said. "So they represent us."
