Now that New Horizons has flown by Pluto and snapped its picture, the spacecraft is expected to continue on with its mission to explore other neighboring objects in the Kuiper Belt.
The Pluto encounter was NASA's first priority, as such a feat had never been accomplished. But now that the probe was successful, NASA expects to receive transmission for the next 16 months while New Horizons floats deeper into the little-traversed Kuiper Belt, ABC News reported.
Click here for an image gallery from NASA chronicling the successful Pluto flyby.
Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator, spoke about the spacecraft's future at a news conference ahead of the flyby's completion.
"Eventually, we'll get to a point where we can't operate the primary spacecraft computer and the communications system. We've estimated that that point will be reached sometime in the mid 2030s, roughly 20 years from now," he told reporters, according to ABC News. "Over those next 20 years, if a spacecraft continues to be healthy, it could operate and return scientific data."
While NASA expects to receive New Horizons' final transmission sometime next fall, the spacecraft seems to have enough power to continue traveling another two decades. New Horizons originally launched about nine years ago for the primary purpose of taking Pluto's close-up, but now NASA is in a position to get extra use out of the probe.
Pluto appears to be the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, an area beyond the orbit of Neptune and on the outermost reaches of the solar system. New Horizons could reignite the debate over Pluto's status as a dwarf planet, depending on what NASA can learn about the Kuiper Belt.
"We're just learning that a lot of planets are small planets, and we didn't know that before," Stern told CNN. "Fact is, in planetary science, objects such as Pluto and the other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt are considered planets and called planets in everyday discourse in scientific meetings."
