NASA’s New Horizons probe has made history several times since its launch in 2006. Pluto was a planet then, but it had become a dwarf planet when New Horizons beamed its first close-up photos back in 2015. The probe then flew deeper into the Kuiper Belt in and yielded the first images of Arrokoth. . Now it is only the fifth man-made object to reach a distance of 50 astronomical units. In celebration, New Horizons took a photo of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Well, it tried, but Voyager 1 is still way behind.
New Horizons now joins the 50 AU club with Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. It would have taken too much fuel to slow New Horizons on Pluto, so it just kept going. That gave it the opportunity to view the fascinating Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), known as Arrokoth, where it blew past on New Year’s Day 2019.
An astronomical unit (AU) is equal to the distance between the Earth and the sun, approximately 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). Pluto is only 30 AU away, and New Horizons made it there in just nine years. Its launch in 2006 set a record for the fastest ever, and that record continues to this day. And it’s still one of the fastest things we’ve ever built. It has enough speed to escape the solar system, but it will never overtake Voyager 1. New Horizons is moving at 8 miles per second, but Voyager’s multiple gravity accelerated it to 10 miles per second.
The location of Voyager 1 as seen by New Horizons.
After reaching 50 AU, NASA turned New Horizon’s camera toward Voyager 1 and took a picture (above). You can’t see the 1977 spacecraft, which is about a trillion times too faint. However, it would be right in the center, as indicated by the circle.
New Horizons is still healthy and NASA hopes it can intercept another KBO. Teams on Earth use powerful telescopes like Japan’s Subaru Observatory to scan the spacecraft’s path to see if there are viable targets. Regardless of whether there is another CBE in the future of the probe, it has a long life ahead of it. NASA will ship updated software to New Horizons this summer to increase its scientific capabilities. Its nuclear battery should keep it shipped until the end of the 2030s.
Read now: