NASA’s New Horizons reaches a rare milestone in space

In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA’s New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to send a command to the spacecraft and be told the on-board computer received the instructions and was ready to execute .

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 will hit a rare milestone in deep space: 50 astronomical units from the sun, or 50 times farther from the sun than Earth .

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 area where one of those radio commands, even traveling at the speed of light, takes seven hours 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 14 hours. 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.

“That’s a terrifyingly beautiful picture 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 was never done before New Horizons. Most of us on the team took part in this mission because it was just an idea, and during that time our kids have grown up, and our parents, and ourselves, have gotten older. But 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 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.

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 Neptune. This 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.