The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune. - FactzPedia

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The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune.

 

The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune.      

  






The Kuiper Belt is a ring of icy bodies and is where Pluto is located.


It’s vast and mysterious, cold and dark. But you can see the objects within it. What does it include? It’s primarily made up of icy objects, dwarf planets, dust, and comets. The total mass of all the material in the Kuiper Belt today is estimated to be no more than about 10 percent of the mass of Earth. A fairly large number of KBOs either have moons—that is, significantly smaller bodies that orbit them—or are binary objects. Binaries are pairs of objects that are relatively similar in size or mass that orbit around a point (a shared center of mass) that lies between them.

From earth, it is studied by astronomers. From space, spacecraft explore it and send images and data. The first spacecraft to enter the Kuiper Belt region was NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft, when it crossed into the space beyond Neptune’s orbit in 1983. But that spacecraft didn’t visit any of the icy worlds in the region—none other than Pluto had been discovered yet. The first spacecraft to actually visit an object in the Kuiper Belt was NASA’s New Horizons, which flew by Pluto and its moons in July 2015. The New Horizons spacecraft flew past the ancient Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2014 MU69) on Jan. 1, 2019, providing humankind’s first close-up look at one of the icy remnants of solar system formation

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