new horizons of research

New Horizons

The first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close, flying by the dwarf planet and its moons in 2015. After a nine-year journey, New Horizons also passed its second major science target, reaching the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in 2019, the most distant object ever explored up close. Also during its long trek, the spacecraft captured impressive pictures of Jupiter's moons Io, Europa, and Ganymede, and remained healthy as it flew toward the frontier of our solar system at 300,000 miles per year.

What is New Horizons?

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close, flying by the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14, 2015. In early 2019, New Horizons flew past its second major science target – Arrokoth (2014 MU69), the most distant object ever explored up close.

• First spacecraft to explore Pluto and its moons up close.
• First spacecraft to explore a second Kuiper Belt Object up close – Arrokoth (2014 MU69)

Jan. 19, 2006 : Launch

July 14, 2015 : Pluto Flyby

Jan. 1, 2019: Arrokoth Flyby

In Depth: New Horizons

New Horizons is a NASA mission to study the dwarf planet Pluto, its moons, and other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system that extends from about 30 AU, near the orbit of Neptune, to about 50 AU from the Sun.

It was the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program, a medium-class, competitively selected, and principal investigator-led series of missions. (The program also includes Juno and OSIRIS-REx.)

New Horizons was the first spacecraft to encounter Pluto, a relic from the formation of the solar system. By the time it reached the Pluto system, the spacecraft had traveled farther away and for a longer time period (more than nine years) than any previous deep space spacecraft ever launched.

The design of the spacecraft was based on a lineage traced back to the CONTOUR and TIMED spacecraft, both also built by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

Besides its suite of scientific instruments, New Horizons carries a cylindrical radioisotope thermoelectric generator (a spare from the Cassini mission) that provided about 250 watts of power at launch (decaying to 200 watts by the time of the Pluto encounter).

After reaching initial Earth orbit at about 105 × 130 miles (167 × 213 kilometers), the Centaur upper stage fired (for a second time) for nine minutes to boost the payload to an elliptical orbit that stretched to the asteroid belt.

A second firing of the Star 48B solid rocket accelerated the spacecraft to a velocity of about 36,400 miles per hour (58,536 kilometers per hour), the highest launch velocity attained by a human-made object relative to Earth. The spacecraft was now set on a trajectory to the outer reaches of the solar system.

Controllers implemented course corrections on Jan. 28, Jan. 30, and March 9, 2006. A month later, on April 7, 2006, New Horizons passed the orbit of Mars.

A fortuitous chance to test some of the spacecraft’s instruments – especially Ralph (the visible and infrared imager and spectrometer) – occurred June 13, 2006, when New Horizons passed by a tiny asteroid named 132524 APL at a range of about 63,300 miles (101,867 kilometers).

The spacecraft flew by the solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter, for a gravity assist maneuver on Feb. 28, 2007, with the closest approach at 05:43:40 UT. The encounter increased the spacecraft’s velocity by about 9,000 miles per hour (14,000 kilometers per hour), shortening its trip to Pluto by three years.

During the flyby, New Horizons carried out a detailed set of observations over a period of four months in early 2007. These observations were designed to gather new data on Jupiter’s atmosphere, ring system, and moons (building on research from Galileo) and to test out New Horizon’s instruments.

Although observing the moons from distances much farther than Galileo, New Horizons was still able to return impressive pictures of Io (including eruptions on its surface), Europa, and Ganymede.

After the Jupiter encounter, New Horizons sped toward the Kuiper Belt, performing a course correction on Sept. 25, 2007.

The spacecraft was put in hibernation mode starting June 28, 2007, during which time the spacecraft’s onboard computer kept tabs on mission systems, transmitting special codes indicating that operations were either nominal or anomalous. During hibernation, most major systems of New Horizons were deactivated and revived only about two months every year. The second, third, and fourth hibernation cycles were Dec. 16, 2008, Aug. 27, 2009, and Aug. 29, 2014.

New Horizons passed the halfway point to Pluto on Feb. 25, 2010.

The discovery of new Pluto moons Kerberos and Styx during the mission added to concerns that there might be debris or dust around Pluto. Mission planners devised two possible contingency plans in case debris increased as the spacecraft approached Pluto, either using its antenna facing the incoming particles as a shield or flying closer to Pluto where there might be less debris.

On Dec. 6, 2014, ground controllers revived New Horizons from hibernation for the last time to initiate its active encounter with Pluto. At that time, it took four hours and 25 minutes for a signal to reach Earth from the spacecraft.

The spacecraft began its approach phase toward Pluto on Jan. 15, 2015, and its trajectory was adjusted with a 93-second thruster burn on March 10. Two days later, with about four months remaining before its close encounter, New Horizons finally became closer to Pluto than Earth is to the Sun.

Pictures of Pluto began to reveal distinct features by April 29, 2015, with detail increasing week by week into the approach. A final 23-second engine burn on June 29, 2015, accelerated New Horizons toward its target by about 11 inches per second (27 centimeters per second) and fine-tuned its trajectory.

There was concern on July 4, 2015, when New Horizons entered safe mode due to a timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence. Fortunately, the spacecraft returned to normal science operations by July 7.

Three days later, data from New Horizons was used to conclusively answer one of the most basic mysteries about Pluto: its size. Mission scientists concluded that Pluto is about 1,470 miles (2,370 kilometers) in diameter, slightly larger than prior estimates. Its moon Charon was confirmed to be about 750 miles (1,208 kilometers) in diameter.

Finally, at 11:49 UT on July 14, 2015, New Horizons flew about 4,800 miles (7,800 kilometers) above the surface of Pluto. About 13 hours later, at 00:53 UT on July 15, a 15-minute series of status messages was received at mission operations at Johns Hopkins University’s APL (via NASA’s Deep Space Network) confirming that the flyby had been fully successful.

Besides collecting data on Pluto and Charon (the Charon flyby was at about 17,900 miles or 28,800 kilometers), New Horizons also observed Pluto’s other satellites, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx.

The download of the entire set of data collected during the encounter with Pluto and Charon – about 6.25 gigabytes – took over 15 months and was officially completed at 21:48 UT on Oct. 25, 2016. Such a lengthy period was necessary because the spacecraft was roughly 4.5 light-hours from Earth and it could only transmit 1-2 kilobits per second.

Data from New Horizons clearly indicated that Pluto and its satellites were far more complex than imagined, and scientists were particularly surprised by the degree of current activity on Pluto’s surface. The atmospheric haze and lower than predicted atmospheric escape rate forced scientists to fundamentally revise earlier models of the system.

Pluto, in fact, displays evidence of vast changes in atmospheric pressure and possibly had running or standing liquid volatiles on its surface in the past. There are hints that Pluto could have an internal water-ice ocean today.

Stunning photographs showed a vast heart-shaped nitrogen glacier (named Sputnik Planitia for Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite) on the surface. It’s about 600 miles wide (1,000 kilometers), undoubtedly the largest known glacier in the solar system.

On Charon, images showed an enormous equatorial extension tectonic belt, suggesting a long-past water-ice ocean.

In the fall of 2015, after its Pluto encounter, mission planners began to redirect New Horizons for a Jan. 1, 2019, flyby of 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt Object that is approximately 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth. The object was later officially named Arrokoth.

Four course corrections were implemented in the fall while a fifth was carried out on Feb. 1, 2017. The goal of the encounter was to study the surface geology of the object, measure surface temperature, map the surface, search for signs of activity, measure its mass, and detect any satellites or rings.

On April 3, 2017, the spacecraft was halfway from Pluto to its new target. Soon after, on April 10, New Horizons entered hibernation mode, when much of the vehicle remained in an unpowered mode for “a long summer’s nap” that lasted until Sept. 11, 2017. During that time, the flight computer broadcast a weekly beacon-status tone back to Earth, and another data stream once a month on spacecraft health and safety data.

On the anniversary of its Pluto-Charon flyby, July 14, 2017, the New Horizons team unveiled new detailed maps of both planetary bodies.

On Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons flew past Arrokoth, the most distant target in history.

Initial images hinted at a reddish, snowman-like shape, but further analysis of images taken near the closest approach – New Horizons came to within just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) – revealed just how unusual the KBO’s shape really is.

End to end, the overall shape of Arrokoth measures about 22 miles (35 kilometers) long. It’s about 12 miles (20 kilometers) wide, by 6 miles (10 kilometers) thick. The larger lobe was found to be "lenticular," which means it's flattened and shaped like two lenses placed back to back. It has dimensions of approximately 14 × 12 × 4 miles (22 × 20 × 7 kilometers). The smaller lobe is more rounded and is approximately 9 × 9 × 6 miles (14 × 14 × 10 kilometers) in its dimensions.

“We’ve never seen anything like this anywhere in the solar system,” said Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “It is sending the planetary science community back to the drawing board to understand how planetesimals – the building blocks of the planets – form.”

According to Dr. Stern, the New Horizons spacecraft remains healthy deep in the Kuiper Belt, and it is speeding away from the Earth and Sun at a rate of about 300 million miles per year. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode on June 1, 2022, and will remain in hibernation until March 1, 2023, to save fuel, and wear and tear on the spacecraft.

In April 2022 its mission was extended a second time to potentially conduct multi-disciplinary observations of relevance to the solar system and NASA’s Heliophysics and Astrophysics Divisions.

Siddiqi, Asif A. Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958-2016 . NASA History Program Office, 2018.

New Horizons Stories

NASA’s New Horizons Detects Dusty Hints of Extended Kuiper Belt

NASA’s New Horizons to Continue Exploring Outer Solar System

All Eyes on the Ice Giants

New Horizons Team Discusses Discoveries from the Kuiper Belt

New Horizons Team Adds AI Smarts to Its Kuiper Belt Object Search

Discover More Topics From NASA

James Webb Space Telescope

Perseverance Rover

Parker Solar Probe

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Landscapes on the Edge

New horizons for research on earth's surface.

During geologic spans of time, Earth's shifting tectonic plates, atmosphere, freezing water, thawing ice, flowing rivers, and evolving life have shaped Earth's surface features. The resulting hills, mountains, valleys, and plains shelter ecosystems that interact with all life and provide a record of Earth surface processes that extend back through Earth's history. Despite rapidly growing scientific knowledge of Earth surface interactions, and the increasing availability of new monitoring technologies, there is still little understanding of how these processes generate and degrade landscapes.

Landscapes on the Edge identifies nine grand challenges in this emerging field of study and proposes four high-priority research initiatives. The book poses questions about how our planet's past can tell us about its future, how landscapes record climate and tectonics, and how Earth surface science can contribute to developing a sustainable living surface for future generations.

RESOURCES AT A GLANCE

• Press Release
• Report Brief

• Earth Sciences — Water and Hydrology
• Earth Sciences — Geology and Landforms

Suggested Citation

National Research Council. 2010. Landscapes on the Edge: New Horizons for Research on Earth's Surface . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12700. Import this citation to: Bibtex EndNote Reference Manager

Publication Info

• Paperback:  978-0-309-14024-9
• Ebook:  978-0-309-15268-6

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Landscapes on the Edge: New Horizons for Research on Earth's Surface

Chemical, physical, biotic, and human processes constantly reshape Earth's surface from particles to continents. These processes form a complex network of interactions and feedbacks, but these interplays are not well understood, and challenging questions face science and society: How did Earth surface processes interact to create the landscapes of today? How will changing processes shape Earth's surface in coming years? In this new video, Dr. Dorothy Merritts describes the research agenda laid out in the recent National Research Council report Landscapes on the Edge: New Horizons for Research on Earth's Surface .

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Science Operations Center (SOC)

Science operations center.

Pluto and the Kuiper Belt hold many secrets that scientists are anxious to uncover, so the science team works hard to figure out what questions to ask and what data (including images) to collect to reveal those secrets. In addition to choosing the right observations, the scientists must be able to study the data once it comes back to Earth.

The Tombaugh Science Operations Center at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

The New Horizons spacecraft, just like Earth-bound computers, speaks in a stream of cryptic-looking 1's and 0's (in this case traversing space via radio waves). How do we make sense of this? How do we command the spacecraft to do what we want it to do? The New Horizons Science Operations Center answers these questions.

The Science Operations Center (or "SOC") is both a computer facility in Boulder, Colorado, and an experienced and synergistic team of people who have to stay a step ahead of the spacecraft during its journey. The SOC has three main responsibilities:

• Uplink (observation "sequencing")
• Downlink (an automated "data pipeline")
• Archive ( the place to get the data)

The Uplink Process

The New Horizons spacecraft listens to Earth, waiting to be told what to do next. It hears radio waves, and riding on those waves are commands composed of patterns of "bits" (1's and 0's). The commands themselves are sent to the spacecraft by the Mission Operations Center (or "MOC") at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, which is where all direct communication with New Horizons happens. But if those commands involve collecting science data, the SOC uplink team has to first work with the scientists to interpret and translate their objectives into the spacecraft's language. The plan might be to collect data that will tell us something we never knew before, or just to take some really cool pictures--and there are plenty of those to be taken!

The act of translating scientists' objectives into spacecraft commands is called "sequencing," and it is a very specialized skill. It requires both an understanding of the science and an intimate familiarity with the spacecraft's capabilities. These experts have to know a LOT about New Horizons and how it works in very fine detail. Also, sequencing is a great responsibility. Those commands have to be right! There is a way, however, to try out the commands before they ever are sent for real, and that is to use a ground-based simulator. Simulating the behavior of the spacecraft to the commands ahead of time goes a long way toward making sure there are no mistakes in the sequences, reducing risk.

The 3D nature of space makes planning observations extremely tricky. Software tools are used to help with visualizing the fields of view for the instruments (like the view you see when you look through your camera, for example), making sure that the instrument takes a snapshot of just the region the scientists want to observe. These tools can also calculate important parameters for spacecraft and instrument safety, such as the angle between the spacecraft and the Sun. To point an instrument for an observation, often the spacecraft has to rotate around through, say, 90 degrees, but there are a few instruments onboard that would be harmed if they looked straight at the Sun during one of these turns. So sequences are designed to rotate the spacecraft in a specific way to avoid looking at the Sun.

Even moving at the speed of light, radio waves can take hours to reach the spacecraft - so many of the commands sent to the spacecraft are programmed to execute at a specific time in order to capture images and data at just the right moment (like "closest approach," when we can get the most detailed images). Thus, uplink is a little like choreographing an intricate dance between New Horizons, Pluto, its moons, and other Kuiper Belt objects like Arrokoth. The result is the data that are sent back to Earth, where the downlink processing happens.

Downlink and the Data Pipeline

From Pluto, radio waves take 4½ hours to reach Earth. Also, at that distance, the signal is very weak, so large antenna dishes on Earth, part of NASA's Deep Space Network, are needed to receive the faint radio waves. A ground-based network gets the raw data to the MOC for processing, where the data is cleaned up (bad data is removed) and put into large "daily archive" files. At this point, the data is intact, but it is in a very raw form that would not make much sense to anyone who would need to look at or use it. It is the SOC's job to sort this out and produce usable science data.

View images from the Science Operations Center (SOC) >

The SOC computers fetch the large archive files from the MOC each day over the Internet and put them through an automated system called the Science Data Pipeline. The data in the archives is in the form of packets of bits, and these packets need to be decoded and pieced together to make each data set or image. As illustrated below, an image can contain thousands of packets with millions of bits.

Packets can arrive out of order, and they can even be missing (having undergone damage during their long voyage). Also, science data is mixed in with "housekeeping" information like temperatures and voltages from the spacecraft and the various instruments. So in order to find the observations within this "soup" of data, the pipeline must sort and group the packets, ultimately producing science data files. In the case of New Horizons, all of the files produced by the pipeline are in a format called FITS (Flexible Image Transport System), which has been used for years in astronomy. This process is depicted below (click on the diagram for a larger version):

But what if data is late in arriving or never makes it back? The pipeline will actually detect these cases and go on to produce the data file, leaving the missing area blank. If the missing data does finally come in, the pipeline will then generate a new version of that file.

As you can imagine, it is not cheap to send data over such vast expanses of space. Also, New Horizons is going so far from Earth that the transmission speed will eventually slow to less than that of an old-fashioned telephone modem! In fact, data from the Pluto encounter took many months to download. Because of this slow data rate, much of the data sent back is compressed. The same is true for the Arrokoth encounter.

There are two kinds of compression used: lossless and lossy. Lossless data, as the name implies, preserves every bit when reconstruced. It is a little like a "zip" file on a PC: you can expect to recover the original data exactly. But even more compression can be achieved by using using lossy compression, which is like the method most digital cameras and web pages use to save memory space. Lossy images lose some information, but they still look great, and because they take less time to receive, they will likely be the first images to hit the Web and newspapers. Lossless versions of those same images (well, at least the good ones) will be downloaded later for precise scientific use.

And it does not stop there. There is one more important step that the pipeline performs automatically. For data to be truly scientifically useful, it needs to be correct. Measurements were taken both before and after launch that establish exactly how the instruments perform, and still more are planned. This information is used to correct for the fact that the instruments are real-world devices. The space environment, and even the launch itself, can affect how the instruments perform. So after the data sets are made, they are calibrated, giving them scientifically useful accuracy and making the results meaningful.

You might be wondering what kind of computers are used for all of this. Well, high-end servers are now in use, and they were considered fast machines at the time of purchase. But no matter how fast computers are today, they will seem pretty sluggish in 5 or 10 years, and this mission is at least 13 years long! For this reason, the hardware will be upgraded at least once during the mission. Also, almost all software used is "open source" (include the operating system, which is Linux), meaning the source code is available in case it is ever needed — which is a good thing for a long mission like this.

The Data Archive

The SOC also is the place mission scientists go to get their data. It hosts its own archive and an interactive Web-based database that can be searched to find specific data. However, there is another kind of archive that is important for future generations of scientists. To ensure that mission data is available for years to come, NASA maintains the Planetary Data System (PDS) archive, and after each major phase of the New Horizons mission, the SOC will send data to the PDS where it will be safely stored long-term.

As you can see a lot of exciting things are happening every day at the Science Operations Center . In fact, the SOC is the place to be if you want to be the first to see the official data!

Advanced science.  Applied technology.

• SwRI New Horizons scientist measures brightness of our galaxy at key ultraviolet wavelength
• Press Releases

November 22, 2021 — A new study led by Southwest Research Institute determined the brightness of the galactic Lyman-alpha background using a SwRI-developed instrument aboard NASA’s Kuiper Belt space probe, New Horizons.

The space Lyman-alpha ultraviolet background was first detected in the 1960s, and its existence was later confirmed in 1971. This ultraviolet glow permeates space and can be used to characterize the tenuous wind of hydrogen atoms which blows through our solar system. It has also been used by SwRI instruments on NASA spacecraft to image permanently dark craters near the north and south poles of the Moon.

In most of our solar system, the background is dominated by Lyman-alpha photons emitted by the sun and scattered by interstellar hydrogen atoms that are passing through. In the outer solar system, however, where the New Horizons spacecraft travels, the scattered sunlight component of the Lyman-alpha signal is far less bright and the fainter components from the nearby regions of the Milky Way become easier to distinguish.

“The galactic Lyman-alpha background comes from hot regions around massive stars which ionize all the matter near them, which is primarily hydrogen, as that is the most abundant element in the universe,” said Dr. Randy Gladstone, the study’s lead author. “When the electrons and protons eventually get back together, or recombine, they nearly always emit Lyman-alpha photons.”

Hydrogen atoms between the stars scatter these photons into a roughly uniform glow throughout space. They are detectable, Gladstone said, but only at the Lyman-alpha wavelength, which is at a wavelength about four times shorter than can be seen by human eyes.

“The Lyman-alpha background has been studied a lot near the Earth’s orbit, and is bright enough that if we could see it, the night sky would never get darker than twilight,” Gladstone explained. “It’s so bright from solar Lyman-alpha that we weren’t certain how much the Milky Way galaxy contributed to its overall brightness. It’s like standing near a streetlamp on a foggy night. The fog scatters the lamp’s light, making it hard to see anything else.”

With the SwRI-led Alice UV imaging spectrograph aboard New Horizons, Gladstone was able to accurately measure the brightness of the galactic component of the Lyman-alpha background for the first time.

“New Horizons has been flying away from the Sun for more than 15 years now,” Gladstone explained. “The farther we moved away from the Sun, the less we were blinded by the solar component of the Lyman-alpha background.”

With New Horizons now far beyond Pluto, Gladstone was able to measure the brightness of the Lyman-alpha background from the Milky Way for the first time: about 20 times less bright than the Lyman-alpha background is near Earth.

“This has been something that’s been guessed at by astronomers for decades,” Gladstone said. “Now we have a much more precise number.”

Gladstone hopes that this discovery will help astronomers better understand the nearby regions of the Milky Way galaxy.

“The unique position of New Horizons in the far away Kuiper Belt allows it to make discoveries like this that no other spacecraft can,” said New Horizons principal investigator and SwRI space division associate vice president Dr. Alan Stern. “What a great resource New Horizons is, not just for the exploration of the Kuiper Belt, but also to understand more about our galaxy and even the universe beyond our galaxy through this and other observations by our scientific instrument payload.”

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The MSFC Planetary Management Office provides the NASA oversight for the New Horizons. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Stern, and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

For more information, visit  Planetary Science or contact Joanna Quintanilla , +1 210 522 2073 , Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, 6220 Culebra Road, San Antonio, TX 78238-5166.

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National Research Council (US) Committee on Future Directions for Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health; Singer BH, Ryff CD, editors. New Horizons in Health: An Integrative Approach. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2001.

New Horizons in Health: An Integrative Approach.

• Hardcopy Version at National Academies Press

1 Introduction

H istorically speaking, human health has been a tale of ever-shifting horizons. For much of the distant past, health was equivalent to short-term survival in the face of food scarcity, predators, and pestilence. With gains in agriculture, sanitation, and the growth of community, length of life was extended somewhat. Later, the scientific revolution transformed health into a biological realm that was primarily the purview of medical fields, at least in Western and economically developed cultures. The past century has witnessed dramatic gains in longevity, thanks to unprecedented advances in diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease, along with unimaginable gains in technology that facilitate understanding health at molecular, cellular, and genetic levels. Still, there remains significant distance to travel in the journey toward optimal human health. The horizon before us is one in which health encompasses not only the workings of biology, the brain, and the body but also the human mind, its thoughts and feelings, human actions and behavior, as well as the nature of social ties, friendships, family, and community life.

With this vision before us, we call for a new era of research and practice at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that integrates biomedical and social behavioral fields of inquiry to promote the nation's health. Increasing evidence documents the role of behavioral, psychological, social, and environmental factors as causes of death. In a widely cited paper, McGinnis and Foege (1993) showed that unhealthy behaviors and environmental exposures were the “actual causes of death” that accounted for 50 percent of all U.S. mortality. Moreover, modern scientific tools afford far-reaching opportunities for unraveling mechanistic processes (e.g., environmentally induced gene expression, overload of physiological systems) through which behavioral and psychosocial factors contribute to illness and disease. In counterpoint to such maladaptive biobehavioral interactions, people's positive daily practices (e.g., getting proper nutrition, engaging in physical activity, avoiding cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs), along with the quality of their social relationships, psychological outlooks, and community supports are emerging as key ingredients to health and well-being over the life course. In short, the behavioral and social sciences are unavoidably implicated in making sense of both illness and good health, although much as yet is unknown about how these effects occur, particularly in terms of what can be done to avoid their deleterious impacts as well as promote their salubrious benefits for ever larger segments of the population.

This chapter sets the stage for the proposed new era of integrative health research. We first briefly review the history of the behavioral and social sciences at NIH and then describe the specific charge to the committee and our interpretation of this charge.

The integrative approach to health is the overarching theme of this report. In support of it, we revisit the distinguished intellectual history of those who have called for such bringing together of multiple levels of analysis. In numerous corners of science, the need to embark on new inquiries that put the disciplines together is a growing refrain. This synthesis—the move toward “consilience” ( Wilson, 1998 )—is particularly essential if we are to achieve comprehensive understanding of how good health at the level of the individual and of society is realized or lost. Much has been learned, and will continue to be gained, by focusing on single diseases and single mechanistic processes, but we bring into high relief the reality that many illnesses co-occur, as do many risk factors (behavioral and biological). What is needed, thus, are new studies that delineate the biopsychosocial pathways through which converging processes contribute to diverse health outcomes.

Each of the following chapters is broad and integrative in scope. Collectively, the chapters comprise key elements required for integration, from molecular, cellular, and genetic levels through behavioral, psychological, social, and environmental levels to multiple health outcomes. Stated otherwise, the chapters embody what the committee deemed critical influences that are essential to understanding the pathways to health.

• THE CONTEXT: BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH

The behavioral and social sciences are increasingly recognized as vital contributors to understanding and improving the nation's health. In this regard, it is important to note the long history of behavioral and social science research at NIH. For example, the National Heart Institute, predecessor of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, was founded in 1948 and funded its first behavioral science research grant in 1955. The study was focused on psychological factors related to high blood pressure and coronary heart disease. The National Cancer Institute, established in 1937, also has an extensive behavioral research program emphasizing cancer prevention and control. The historical roots of this broad agenda reside in the mandate of the National Cancer Act, passed by Congress in 1971. More generally, many of the institutes have longstanding and well-developed behavioral and social science programs. Trans-institute initiatives with linkages to basic biology are also appearing with increasing frequency, such as the recent call for proposals on socioeconomic status and health as well as the recent establishment of five new mind/body centers around the country.

At the same time, the behavioral and social sciences have limited presence at some institutes or are seen as peripheral to primary agendas. Also, when considered at all, behavioral, psychological, and social priorities are sometimes restricted to a narrow focus on their role as risk factors for particular disease outcomes. To facilitate the growth and development of these important fields, Congress established the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at NIH in 1995. A central message of OBSSR, and the background for this report, is that behavioral, psychosocial, and environmental factors have broad significance at NIH and are fundamental to comprehensive understanding of diverse disease etiologies as well as to positive health promotion.

• THE CHARGE TO THE COMMITTEE

In 1999 the director of OBSSR requested assistance from the National Research Council (NRC) to develop a research plan to guide NIH in supporting areas of high priority in the social and behavioral sciences. Three principal goals shaped the OBSSR planning efforts: (1) enhancement of behavioral and social sciences research and training, (2) integration of biobehavioral interdisciplinary perspectives across NIH, and (3) improvement of communication between those conducting scientific research and the general public. The OBSSR sought to use the priorities requested from the NRC as a framework within which to implement these goals.

Within the NRC and its Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (CBASSE), the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences chose to undertake a brief, highly focused study in response to the OBSSR request. The board established our committee to carry out this activity. Drawing on the existing social behavioral research base, the committee was asked to frame its discussion around four key areas:

• behavioral and social risk and protective factors;
• biological, behavioral, and social interactions as they affect health;
• behavioral and social treatment and prevention approaches;
• basic behavioral and social processes.

In addition, the committee was encouraged to consider the following issues in shaping its response: (a) health problems for which behavioral and social sciences research might offer solutions with respect to treatment and prevention, (b) areas of scientific opportunity in the behavioral and social sciences where a substantial investment might pay large dividends in the near future, (c) the public's chief health concerns.

Finally, the committee was asked to give special attention to collaborative research, interdisciplinary projects, and trans-institute initiatives that would have general application to broad areas of illness and health and would be sensitive to perspectives of the various NIH institutes. In considering this charge, the committee decided not to undertake a thorough review of all extant social behavioral research at NIH, a behemoth task beyond the scope of this report. Rather, guided by its original charge, the committee set itself to charting promising future directions where the behavioral and social sciences are well poised to connect with extant biomedical and/or intervention agendas (at individual, community, or population levels). Importantly, the members decided this could best be accomplished not by organizing the report around specific diseases or institutes, thereby following the current structure of NIH, but by providing a broader, more integrative approach.

It should be noted that the behavioral and social sciences, as applied to health, have never been organized around specific diseases. This is understandable, given that many behavioral risk factors (e.g., smoking, obesity, sedentary lifestyles, risky sexual practices) not only themselves co-occur but are also precursors to multiple physiological risk factors and multiple adverse health outcomes. The integrative approach thus gives much greater emphasis to the empirical realities of co-occurring risk and comorbidity, both of which are better understood with an integrative approach. The committee's essential task was to identify key components of a comprehensive approach as to how health outcomes, broadly defined, come about.

It is important to underscore three aspects of the committee's approach to its task. First, the committee covered a huge scientific territory in a very limited period of time and yet was able to quickly achieve consensus regarding the overall structure of the report and the content of the chapters. This efficient exchange was greatly facilitated by the prior experience of committee members in carrying out multidisciplinary science. There was little, if any, disciplinary turf guarding or vying for preeminence; instead, the targeted objective from the moment the work began was to find the best framework for integrating multiple fields and agendas.

Second, the committee had no intention of producing an exhaustive set of future research opportunities. Indeed, it is doubtful that such a comprehensive formulation could be developed by any committee. There was also no attempt made to cover extant programs of every institute within NIH. Stated otherwise, the committee was faced with the unavoidable requirement for selectivity. Nonetheless, the integrative research opportunities that it formulated do represent promising trans-institute initiatives, but they are put forth only as illustrations of the kinds of studies for which there could be substantial scientific payoff and opportunity to improve the public's health. Many vibrant areas of current NIH research are, therefore, inevitably missing from the chapters that follow. We state explicitly that what is not in the report is by no means an indirect message about low-priority status.

Third, the committee wrote this report with the scientific audience at NIH, and not the general public, in mind. Our goal is to communicate a new vision of integrative health to those who will carry out the future research and practice. A critical feature of such integration is the need to demonstrate command of complex areas and their interrelationships. Thus, we have not eliminated all technical details but tried to write about them so as to maximize their accessibility to our audience.

• THE INTEGRATIVE APPROACH TO HEALTH

In the past 25 years, the study of human health has included a distinguished, but neglected, intellectual tradition put forth by numerous investigators, who saw the need for broad integrative frameworks that capture complex pathways to illness and disease. Engel (1977) , for example, formulated a multifactorial model of illness, later subsumed under the rubric “biopsychosocial” that views illness as a result of interacting systems at cellular, tissue, organismic, interpersonal, and environmental levels. As a result, the study of every disease must include the individual, the body, and the surrounding environment as essential components. Lipowski (1977) and Fava and Sonino (2000) set the scope, mission, and methods of psychosomatic medicine as also involving interrelated facets of biological, psychological, and social determinants of health and disease. Around the same time, Henry and Stephens (1977) advanced a sociobiological approach to medicine and health that integrated not only biological, psychological, social, and physical environmental factors but also presented comparative studies of pathways to illness and disease between rodents, nonhuman primates, and humans.

More recently, Worthman (1999) combines human biology, life history theory, and epidemiology to consider variations in human development, giving particular emphasis to the role of hormones in the physiological architecture of the life course. Weiner (1998) offers “notes” toward a comprehensive evolutionary theory that integrates the roles of physical, social, environmental, and psychological factors in the maintenance of good health and the pathogenesis of disease. Keating and Hertzman (1999) assemble a cohesive set of essays that are designed to provide an “integration of knowledge about the determinants of health and human development.” McEwen and Stellar (1993) introduce a multisystem approach to the cumulative physiological toll exacted by adverse behavioral, psychological, social, and environmental influences over the life course. This formulation of cumulative physiological risk is linked to unfolding interactions between genetic and environmental influences over time.

At an even broader level of thinking, E.O. Wilson has adapted and expanded on William Whewell's 1840 notion of consilience ( Wilson, 1998 , p. 8) as a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and factbased theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. Wilson emphasized that “a unified system of knowledge is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality. It provides a clear map of what is known, and it frames the most productive questions for future inquiry.” Wilson's integration includes not only the full range of scientific disciplines but also the humanities and, as such, represents even more distant horizons for promoting health and well-being.

These perspectives collectively provide conceptual background to the theme of integration that guides this report and our related efforts to characterize pathways to multiple health outcomes. The time for this larger synthesis of scientific disciplines in pursuit of human health has come.

• KEY INFLUENCES ON PATHWAYS TO HEALTH

Our task as a committee was one of identifying key elements that comprise an integrated and comprehensive approach to health. When the behavioral and social sciences are emphasized and linked to health, one is automatically led away from a disease-specific emphasis and into a view of multiple pathways to multiple outcomes. For example, smoking is a behavior linked to lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and cardiovascular diseases. Quality of social relationships, in turn, has been linked to cardiovascular diseases, later-life cognitive functioning, and recovery from a variety of illnesses. In both examples, and numerous others documented in this report, there is a need for understanding the pathways underlying these coarse-grained linkages. Moreover, full understanding of pathways requires a long time horizon that includes genetic predispositions and early life antecedents that contribute to later-life health and disease. It requires a multilevel view of life histories in which, for example, gene expression is seen as a dynamic process linked to psychosocial experience and community-level structures.

A behavioral and social science emphasis also leads naturally to a focus on prevention. This is not to detract from the social behavioral contributions to disease etiology, clinical medicine, and the organization and operation of the health care system. However, when the objective is to understand the mechanisms that explain how a range of health outcomes come about, it is appropriate and meaningful to identify health-promoting practices that can prevent or delay illness and disability and reduce the demand for curative health services.

With these observations in mind, the committee identified 10 priority areas for research investment that would integrate the behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences at NIH. These are briefly noted below, with emphasis on why they were selected and what they contribute to the larger mosaic of health.

Predisease Pathways: identification of early and long-term biological, behavioral, psychological, and social precursors to disease. This priority is intended to broaden the time horizons that guide research on disease etiology as well as underscore agendas that may lead to early preventive strategies.

Positive Health: identification of biological, behavioral, and psychosocial factors that contribute to resilience, disease resistance, and wellness. This priority draws attention to the need for greater emphasis throughout NIH on the biopsychosocial factors that help individuals maintain or regain good health throughout the life course.

Environmentally Induced Gene Expression: emphasis on the need to connect modern advances in genetic analysis to environmental factors (behavioral, psychological, social) to clarify their interactions in understanding positive and negative health outcomes.

Personal Ties: the growing body of literature that connects the social world to health and calls for greater explication of the biobehavioral mechanisms by which relationships with significant others (family, friends, co-workers) influence health and disease.

Collective Properties and Healthy Communities: greater emphasis on neighborhood and community-level variables, such as residential instability or social cohesion, and how they contribute to positive or negative health practices and outcomes.

Inequality and Health: builds in the growing awareness that socioeconomic hierarchies, racism, discrimination, and stigmatization are linked with differences in health and illness and calls for greater understanding of the mechanisms through which these effects occur and how they can be reversed.

Population Health: greater understanding of macro-level trends in health status, how the macroeconomy and population health are linked, and the performance of the health care system.

Interventions: expansion of the scope and effectiveness of behavioral, psychosocial, and biological strategies for improving health, including multilevel (individual, family, organizational, population) initiatives.

Methodology: emerges from the recognition that new measurement techniques and study designs are required to link information across diverse levels of analysis (molecular, cellular, behavioral, psychosocial, community) and across time.

Infrastructure: refers to the need for future structures and resources to maintain long-term study populations and train new generations of scientists to integrate health-related knowledge across multiple disciplines.

The scope of these priorities is expansive and integrative, with each encompassing wide areas of research. Some represent phenomena at the individual level, while others deal with macro-level (e.g. population) issues. The chapters that follow elaborate each of these priorities and identify principal recommendations associated with them. Collectively, they comprise the integrated pathway approach to health that is the guiding theme of this report.

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• Henry JP, Stephens P. Stress, Health and the Social Environment: A Sociobiologic Approach to Medicine. New York: Springer-Verlag; 1977.
• Keating DP, Hertzman C. Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations: Social, Biological, and Educational Dynamics. New York: The Guilford Press; 1999.
• Lipowski ZJ. Psychosomatic medicine in the seventies: An overview. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1977; 134 :233–244. [ PubMed : 320882 ]
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• McGinnis JM, Foege WH. “Actual causes of death in the United States” Journal of the American Medical Association. 1993; 270 :2207–2212. [ PubMed : 8411605 ]
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• Wilson EO. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
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• Cite this Page National Research Council (US) Committee on Future Directions for Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health; Singer BH, Ryff CD, editors. New Horizons in Health: An Integrative Approach. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2001. 1, Introduction.
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Unexpected Discovery by NASA’s New Horizons Redefines Solar System’s Outer Edge

By NASA March 2, 2024

New Horizons spacecraft’s observations suggest the Kuiper Belt extends far beyond its thought boundary, potentially indicating a larger region or a second belt filled with icy, rocky objects, challenging existing solar system models. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

NASA ’s New Horizons has discovered unexpectedly high dust levels in the Kuiper Belt , hinting at a larger expanse or a new belt, reshaping our understanding of the solar system’s outer edge.

New observations from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hint that the Kuiper Belt – the vast, distant outer zone of our solar system populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks – might stretch much farther out than we thought.

Speeding through the outer edges of the Kuiper Belt, almost 60 times farther from the Sun than Earth, the New Horizons Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (SDC) instrument is detecting higher than expected levels of dust – the tiny frozen remnants of collisions between larger Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and particles kicked up from KBOs being peppered by microscopic dust impactors from outside of the solar system.

The readings defy scientific models that the KBO population and density of dust should start to decline a billion miles inside that distance and contribute to a growing body of evidence that suggests the outer edge of the main Kuiper Belt could extend billions of miles farther than current estimates – or that there could even be a second belt beyond the one we already know.

The results appear in the February 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters .

Artist’s concept of a collision between two objects in the distant Kuiper Belt. Such collisions are a major source of dust in the belt, along with particles kicked up from Kuiper Belt objects being peppered by microscopic dust impactors from outside of the solar system. Credit: Dan Durda, FIAAA

New Discoveries Beyond Neptune

“New Horizons is making the first direct measurements of interplanetary dust far beyond Neptune and Pluto , so every observation could lead to a discovery,” said Alex Doner, lead author of the paper and a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder who serves as SDC lead. “The idea that we might have detected an extended Kuiper Belt — with a whole new population of objects colliding and producing more dust – offers another clue in solving the mysteries of the solar system’s most distant regions.”

Designed and built by students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder under the guidance of professional engineers, SDC has detected microscopic dust grains produced by collisions among asteroids, comets and Kuiper Belt objects all along New Horizons’ 5-billion-mile, 18-year journey across our solar system – which after launch in 2006 included historic flybys of Pluto in 2015 and the KBO Arrokoth in 2019. The first science instrument on a NASA planetary mission to be designed, built and “flown” by students, the SDC counts and measures the sizes of dust particles, producing information on the collision rates of such bodies in the outer solar system.

The latest, surprising results were compiled over three years as New Horizons traveled from 45 to 55 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun – with one AU being the distance between Earth and the Sun, about 93 million miles or 140 million kilometers.

Artist conception of New Horizons Spacecraft. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

These readings come as New Horizons scientists, using observatories like the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, have also discovered a number KBOs far beyond the traditional outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. This outer edge (where the density of objects starts to decline) was thought to be at about 50 AU, but new evidence suggests the belt may extend to 80 AU, or farther. 

As telescope observations continue, Doner said, scientists are looking at other possible reasons for the high SDC dust readings. One possibility, perhaps less likely, is radiation pressure and other factors pushing dust created in the inner Kuiper Belt out past 50 AU. New Horizons could also have encountered shorter-lived ice particles that cannot reach the inner parts of the solar system and were not yet accounted for in the current models of the Kuiper Belt.

“These new scientific results from New Horizons may be the first time that any spacecraft has discovered a new population of bodies in our solar system,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. “I can’t wait to see how much farther out these elevated Kuiper Belt dust levels go.”

New Horizons’ Continuing Journey

Now into its second extended mission, New Horizons is expected to have sufficient propellant and power to operate through the 2040s, at distances beyond 100 AU from the Sun. That far out, mission scientists say, the SDC could potentially even record the spacecraft’s transition into a region where interstellar particles dominate the dust environment. With complementary telescopic observations of the Kuiper Belt from Earth, New Horizons, as the only spacecraft operating in and collecting new information about the Kuiper Belt, has a unique opportunity to learn more about KBOs, dust sources and expanse of the belt, and interstellar dust and the dust disks around other stars.

Reference: “New Horizons Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter Observes Higher than Expected Fluxes Approaching 60 au” by Alex Doner, Mihály Horányi, Fran Bagenal, Pontus Brandt, Will Grundy, Carey Lisse, Joel Parker, Andrew R. Poppe, Kelsi N. Singer, S. Alan Stern and Anne Verbiscer, 25 January 2024,  The Astrophysical Journal Letters . DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad18b0

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

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1 comment on "unexpected discovery by nasa’s new horizons redefines solar system’s outer edge".

My work with the Stars in Celestia star program tell me that a Solar System is aprox. .01 ly = (632.4 au, = 316200 sec, = 87 hours 50 minutes) in Radius.

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