A video has shown a simulation of the space environment all the way out to Pluto in the months when the New Horizons' July 2015 flyby was going on. That time, scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were working along with the New Horizons team for testing how accurate models made by them and the ones contributed by scientists worldwide forecasted the space environment at Pluto.

By understanding the environment through in which our spacecraft travel can eventually prove helpful in protecting our spacecrafts from radiation and other likely damaging effects. Visualizers at Goddard have updated the model’s movie lately, resulting into this latest release.

The space’s vacuum is nearly a thousand times emptier as compared to a laboratory vacuum, but still it’s not fully empty. The sun releases a continuous stream of particles known as the solar wind and also occasional denser clouds of particles called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs-both consisting embedded magnetic fields.

These particles’ speed, density and temperature and also the direction and the embedded magnetic fields’ strength constituted the space environment.

For mapping the Pluto’s space environment, scientists combined the predictions of a number of models-and observed events that had long since passed the planet Earth.

A space weather scientist at Goddard who created the Enlil model, Dusan Odstrcil, said, “We set the simulation to start in January of 2015, because the particles passing Pluto in July 2015 took some six months to make the journey from the sun”.