3 Questions: Richard Binzel on New Horizons’ closest view of Pluto

On Jan. 19, 2006, NASA launched a space probe the size of a golf cart on a mission to explore the farthest reaches of the solar system; its destination was the Kuiper Belt, a frigid region beyond the planets, populated with icy bodies, the largest of which is Pluto. Traveling faster than any probe before it, the New Horizons spacecraft glanced past Jupiter in 2007, using the massive planet’s gravity to slingshot the probe toward Pluto. Today, after a nine-and-a-half-year journey, New Horizons made its closest approach to the dwarf planet, passing within 7,767 miles — about the distance from Boston to Johannesburg. The probe’s images of Pluto, taken at a resolution that surpasses that of the Hubble Space Telescope, reveal an icy, and surprisingly complex, world. Richard Binzel, a New Horizons mission co-investigator and a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, spoke with MIT News...

Read the whole article on MIT Research

More from MIT Research