Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft en route to a January 2019 encounter with the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69. Credit: NASA
In the weeks after the launch in early 2006, when NASANew Horizons was still close to home, it only took a few minutes to send a command to the spacecraft and be told that the on-board computer received the instructions and was ready to execute the instructions.
As New Horizons traversed the solar system and the distance to Earth jumped from millions to billions of miles, that time between contacts grew from a few minutes to a few hours. And on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons reached a rare milestone in deep space – 50 astronomical units from the sun, or 50 times farther from the sun than Earth.
Solar system scale
Here’s one way to imagine how far 50 AU is: Think of the solar system built on a neighborhood street; the sun is a house to the left of ‘home’ (or the earth), Mars would be the next house on the right, and Jupiter would be only four houses on the right. New Horizons would be 50 houses down the street, 17 houses down the street Pluto
New Horizons is only the fifth spacecraft to reach this great distance, following the legendary Voyagers 1 and 2 and their predecessors, Pioneers 10 and 11. It is nearly 5 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away; a remote region where one of those commands sent by radio, even as they travel at the speed of light, needs seven o’clock to reach the distant spacecraft. Then add seven more hours for the Earth control team to find out if the message was received.
“It’s hard to imagine anything this far away,” said Alice Bowman, the manager of the New Horizons mission at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “One thing that makes this distance tangible is how long it takes for us to confirm on Earth that the spacecraft has received our instructions. This went from almost instantaneous to now on the order of 2 pm. It makes the extreme distance real. “
To mark the occasion, New Horizons recently photographed the star field where one of its long-range cousins, Voyager 1, appears from the unique site of New Horizons in the Kuiper Belt. Never before has a spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt photographed the location of an even more distant spacecraft, now in interstellar space. Although Voyager 1 is far too faint to be seen directly in the image, its location is precisely known thanks to NASA’s radio tracking.
Hello, Voyager! From the distant Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system, on Christmas Day, December 25, 2020, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft pointed its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager in the direction of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the location of which is marked with the yellow circle. Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object and the first spacecraft to actually leave the solar system, is more than 152 astronomical units (AU) from the sun – about 14.1 billion miles or 22.9 billion kilometers – and was 11 , 2 billion miles (18 billion kilometers)) from New Horizons when this image was taken. Voyager 1 itself is about 1 trillion times too faint to see in this image. Most of the objects in the image are stars, but some of them, with a blurry appearance, are distant galaxies. New Horizons will hit the 50 AU mark on April 18, 2021 and will join Voyagers 1 and 2 in interstellar space in the 2040s. Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute
“That’s a terrifyingly beautiful image to me,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
“Looking back at New Horizons’ flight from Earth to 50 AU somehow seems almost like a dream,” he continued. Flying a spacecraft all over our solar system to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt had never been done before New Horizons. Most of us on the team have been part of this mission because it was just an idea, and during that time our children have grown up and our parents, and ourselves, have grown older. Most importantly, we’ve made a lot of scientific discoveries, inspired countless STEM careers, and even made a little history. “
New Horizons is practically designed for making history. New Horizons, which shipped at 36,400 miles per hour (58,500 kilometers per hour) on January 19, 2006, was and still is the fastest man-made object ever launched from Earth. Its gravity-assisted flyby of Jupiter in February 2007 not only shaved about three years off its journey to Pluto, but enabled it to capture the best ever views of Jupiter’s faint ring and capture the first film of a volcano. erupting somewhere in the solar system. except the earth.
New Horizons is currently exploring the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto and is just one of five spacecraft to reach 50 astronomical units – 50 times the distance between the Sun and Earth – heading out of the solar system and eventually into interstellar space. Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute
New Horizons successfully conducted the first exploration of the Pluto system in July 2015, followed by the furthest flyby in history – and the first close-up of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) – with its flight past Arrokoth on New Year’s Day 2019. From its unique spot in the Kuiper Belt makes New Horizons observations that cannot be done anywhere else; even the stars look different from the spacecraft’s point of view.
Artistic Conception of New Horizons Spacecraft. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute
New Horizons team members use giant telescopes like the Japanese Subaru Observatory to scan the sky for another potential (and long shot) KBO flyby target, New Horizons itself remains healthy, collecting data on the solar wind and space environment in the Kuiper Belt, other Kuiper Belt objects and distant planets such as Uranus and NeptuneThis summer, the mission team will ship a software upgrade to enhance New Horizons’ scientific capabilities. For future exploration, the spacecraft’s nuclear battery will need to provide enough power to run New Horizons through the late 2030s.