With Pluto firmly in the rearview mirror, New Horizons is now about to reach a significant distance, at which the probe will be 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth. To commemorate the achievement, the probe performed a task that had never been attempted before on the edge of the solar system.
On Saturday, April 17 at 20:42 EDT, New Horizons will be 50 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, where 1 AU is the average distance of The Earth to the Sun, or about 150 million kilometers.
As a milestone, this number is totally arbitrary and pleasing to our base 10 sensibilities, but it represents a rare success: New Horizons is now joining a group of elite spaceships that have reached this distance, the others are pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2. Of these, Voyager 1 is the most human object in history., currently at 152.5 AU from the Sun, or 22.9 billion km.
Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons is now nearly 7.5 billion miles from Earth. At this distance, it takes seven hours of light to reach Earth, which means it now takes 14 hours to transmit instructions to the probe and then receive a confirmation signal to Earth. The probe is so far from home that its vision of distant stars now appears different compared to ours.
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NASA celebrated the achievement by pointing the New Horizons camera at the location of the space where Voyager 1 is currently located.
“Never before had 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. “While Voyager 1 is too faint to see directly in the image, its location is known precisely from NASA’s radio tracking.”
Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, described as a “disturbingly beautiful picture,” and I’m inclined to agree. The photo reminds us that we are in the early stages of becoming an interstellar species and that our reach into the cosmos deepens with each passing day.
Previous milestones in the New Horizons mission include his flybys of Jupiter in 2007 i Pluto in 2015, as well as a meeting with the strange shape Arrokoth in 2019.
From here, the probe will continue to venture towards the outer limit of the solar system. The scientific phase of the mission is still ongoing, as the spacecraft collects important data about the solar wind and the space environment. NASA plans to upgrade the New Horizons software later this year to increase its capabilities. The probe is expected to last at least until the end of the 2030s, when the nuclear battery will no longer maintain the interstellar vehicle.