Scientists criticise NASA for cancelling the Kuiper Belt project.

US space officials and scientists are at odds over Nasa’s choice to stop funding the New Horizons spacecraft, which was meant to study the Kuiper Belt. The decision was called “misguided and unfortunate” by scientists.

People say that the spacecraft could have gone more than 5 billion miles through space and could have hit the edge of the solar system.

Alan Stern, who is in charge of New Horizons, said, “Scientifically, this is a mistake,” and other experts agreed with him.

Nasa says it won’t turn off the spacecraft totally, but it will give it some money so that it can keep studying space weather and other things. But the agency also said that the spacecraft will no longer be used to study the makeup of the planet, which was its main goal.

The Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper suggested the existence of the Kuiper Belt in 1951. It is a doughnut-shaped ring of icy objects left over from when the sun’s planets were made billions of years ago.

Scientists couldn’t get there because it was too far away. The New Horizons spacecraft was built to get there.

NASA’s New Horizons probe took this picture of Pluto when it was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometres) away. — Nasa/File
NASA’s New Horizons probe took this picture of Pluto when it was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometres) away. — Nasa/File
The spacecraft was sent into space in 2006 from Cape Canaveral. In July 2015, it reached Pluto, which is the biggest object in the Kuiper Belt. It sent information back to Earth about its close pass.

After visiting Pluto and its moon, the space probe New Horizons went into the Kuiper Belt and got close to Arrokoth in 2019. This is the most distant and old object ever studied by a space probe.

The pictures of Arrokoth, which is a Native American word that means “sky” in the Powhatan-Algonquin language, showed two lobes that probably formed separately and then merged slowly in a cloud of particles early in the history of our solar system.

Michele Bannister, a planetary scientist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, wrote in the journal Nature last week: “It taught us so much about the basic features of how planets form. It completely changed everything.”

Stern agreed with this point, saying, “The Kuiper belt is made up of planetesimals, which are the building blocks of planets. Thanks to the information that New Horizons sent back, we now know how these building blocks join and stick together to start the process of a planet coming together. This is the most important thing to know if you want to understand our solar system and the planets that orbit other stars.

This picture from NASA shows a side view of the icy volcanic area on Pluto. — AFP/File
This picture from NASA shows a side view of the icy volcanic area on Pluto. — AFP/File
According to the plan, it will take at least four or five years for New Horizons to finish its trip through the Kuiper Belt, where it hopes to meet up with another planetesimal like Arrokoth.

Stern said, “It’s very hard to find another good object to get close to, but we’ve been trying very hard to find one.”

“I think some people at NASA are upset that we don’t have another pass target yet, and I can understand that. We’re doing everything we can to fix it, but it’s such a hard problem. But if you cut off our funds, there will never be another flypast target.”

Image of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2014 MU69) with colours that have been brightened. — Nasa/File
Image of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2014 MU69) with colours that have been brightened. — Nasa/File
It has cost more than $800 million to build and fly to Pluto. Mission control costs about $10 million per year.

When the probe’s main goal is changed to heliophysics, which is the study of the sun’s physics and how it connects to the rest of the solar system, it is possible that a few million dollars will be cut from the budget.

Stern also said, “It’s a waste of money. Even though New Horizons is still in the Kuiper belt, it can still do great work there. But stopping it next year is both too soon from a scientific point of view and a bad idea from an economic policy point of view. I’m very worried about this, and I think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only one.