Bracing for the Belt

摘要

ON SEPTEMBER 11th, nearly 6bn kilometres from Earth, beyond the orbit of Neptune, a spacecraft emerged from hibernation. The primary task of New Horizons, launched by nasa in 2006, was to explore Pluto. It completed that mission in July 2015, zooming past Pluto at almost 50,000kph, then spending over a year transmitting back a trove of data and images that astronomers are still analysing.