with its great diversity of features. Then Haumea is just the most astonishing creature! It’s water-bright and it’s the only KBO where we’ve found
that the siblings are all water-bright. Then Eris is crazy-shiny! It has 96%
geometric albedo. Yet, some of the other objects are as dark as comets, so how does that happen?’
Will we find convective surface renewal on other large bodies at the
edge of the solar system, which may help to explain the high albedos
shown by some of these? So far, we have seen that Pluto, Charon and
Triton are all quite different. More surprises certainly await us as we explore the denizens of the Kuiper belt.
The New Horizons team hopes that their extended mission will help
answer more questions about these. ‘Our future is in NASA’s hands,’
says Leslie Young, ‘but we now have a rendez-vous with 2014 MU69 and
on our way we’re going to be looking at other Kuiper Belt Objects too
from distance. We’ll also be using our plasma detection instruments to
study the environment out here. Together with the two Voyagers we
can try and build up a three-dimensional picture of the outer solar system environment using a series of one-dimensional shots. If possible we
will continue gathering data as long as we can, maybe over a couple
more decades.’
However long the mission is able to continue, it has already offered us
a glittering prize in Pluto and its family of moons. Speaking of her involvement in the discovery of Pluto’s atmosphere back in 1988, Dr. Young says
that ‘when you help rewrite the textbooks, that’s an addictive thing. You
want to do it again and again.’ With New Horizons en route for its next