Kuiper Belt
Overview
The Kuiper belt is the the disc shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is very icy because of its distance from the sun which goes from 30 AU to 55 AU. In this region there many objects bigger than 100 km across. There have been about 70,000 of these large Kuiper belt objects (Also known as Trans-Neptunian) discovered. The Kuiper belt contains billions of comets. Most of these comets are short period comets. Objects in the Kuiper belt are difficult to size because of the distance from earth. That is why the discovery of the Kuiper belt is fairly recent.
Discovery
The first Kuiper Belt Object was discovered in 1992 by Dave Jewitt and Jane Luu. The reason people had trouble seeing these objects is because objects closer to the sun reflect sunlight while objects in the Kuiper belt are so far away that sunlight is not reflected from them. They used light coming off of Halley's Comet to see the objects. KBO’s are still being discovered.
Dwarf Planets
The Kuiper Belt contains large KBO’s called dwarf planets. To be a dwarf planet an object in space must have a large enough gravity to have a near spherical shape, and it can’t have eliminated solar system bodies around it, or it would be considered a planet. Four of the five recognized dwarf planets are found in the Kuiper belt. These four include Pluto, Eris, Makemake and Haumea. Haumea is especially interesting because of its extremely fast rotation, which causes it to be football shaped. The rotation was probably caused by a collision with a planet half its size.
Explorations
New Horizons is a spacecraft sent to view Pluto, dwarf planets, and other things in the Kuiper Belt. It was launched in 2006 and is scheduled to return in 2026. It already flew by Jupiter in 2007, collecting key information. Some of this information is like things about the moons of Jupiter, and impact scarring on Jupiter. It will pass by Pluto in 2015. Some features of the New Horizons spacecraft include optical/infrared instruments, ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, particle detection instrument, dust particle counter, radio experiment and many other things. It has already discovered new KBO’s.
Resources
www.flickr.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_C._Jewitt
http://www2.ess.ucla.edu/~jewitt/David_Jewitt.html
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=KBOs
http://www.universetoday.com/32515/kuiper-belt/
http://www.space.com/16144-kuiper-belt-objects.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_C._Jewitt
http://www2.ess.ucla.edu/~jewitt/David_Jewitt.html
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=KBOs
http://www.universetoday.com/32515/kuiper-belt/
http://www.space.com/16144-kuiper-belt-objects.html