With Pluto firmly in its rearview mirror, New Horizons is now hours away from reaching a milestone distance, in which the probe will be 50 times farther from the sun than Earth. To commemorate the achievement, the spacecraft performed a task never before attempted at the edge of the solar system.
On Saturday, April 17 at 8:42 p.m. EDT, New Horizons will be 50 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, with 1 AU being the average distance of Earth to the sun, or about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).
As a milestone, this number is completely random and pleasing to our base 10 sensibilities, but it represents a rare achievement: New Horizons now joins an elite group of spacecraft that have reached this distance, the others being Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2. Of these, Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object ever currently at 152.5 AU from the sun, or 14.2 billion miles (22.9 billion km).
Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons is now nearly 5 billion miles (7.5 billion km) from Earth. At this distance, the light takes seven hours to reach Earth, meaning it now takes 14 hours to send instructions to the probe and then receive an acknowledgment signal to Earth. The probe is so far from home that it can now see distant stars different compared to ours.
G / O Media can receive a commission
NASA celebrated the achievement by aiming the New Horizons camera at the spot in space where Voyager 1 is currently located.
“Never before has a spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt photographed the location of an even more distant spacecraft, now in interstellar space,” NASA said in a statement. statement“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.”
Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, described it as a “hauntingly beautiful image,” and I tend to agree. The photo reminds us that we are in the early stages of becoming an interstellar species and that our reach in the cosmos is getting deeper every day.
Previous milestones in the New Horizons mission include his flybys from Jupiter in 2007 and Pluto in 2015, as well as a meeting with the strangely shaped Arrokoth in 2019.
From here, the probe will continue to venture to the outer regions of the solar system. The scientific phase of the mission is still ongoing, as the probe is collecting important data about solar wind and the space environment. NASA plans to upgrade New Horizons software later this year to increase its capabilities. The probe is expected to last at least until the end of 2030, after which time the nuclear battery will no longer support the interstellar vehicle.