In the dangerous maintenance facility of NASA’s Kennedy spacecraft, the New Horizons spacecraft stands on a workbench before its launch Credit – NASA / KSC
On January 19, 2006, the Earth lost half a ton. Specifically, he lost 478 kg (1,054 lbs), but it is good to round it down, because the 13 billion kilogram planet hardly noticed the missing weight. The point of matter in the weight of flies was born very much from the planet, a collection of metal and silicon and copper, rubber and plastics and foil and a bit of plutonium hammered together in the spaceship New Horizons. Launched on top of an Atlas V rocket, New Horizons moved away from Earth at 58,500 k / h (36,400 mph), a record speed that seemed very appropriate, given that its destination was Pluto, 5.1 billion km (3, 3 km). 2 billion miles.) Away. If you want to cover such a distance, it is best to make pieces.
New Horizons arrived on Pluto on July 14, 2015, becoming the first spacecraft to enter the dwarf planet. Less than four years later, on January 1, 2019, he passed the object of the 36 km long peanut-shaped Kuiper belt, known as Arrokoth, a rocky, frozen body in the river of comet-like objects, which surrounds the solar system. . And that meeting was a premiere. We have known about the Kuiper Belt since astronomer Gerard Kuiper theorized its existence in 1951, but we have never visited it.
A small ship growing two space records should be sufficiently accomplished. But New Horizons is about to make headlines again. Tomorrow exactly at 8:42 am EDT, an invisible line will pass into space that will place it 7.5 billion kilometers from Earth. This determines 50 astronomical units (AU) – or 50 times the distance from Earth to the Sun – making New Horizons one of only a handful of spacecraft that have passed this cosmic stage. There are plenty of ways to contemplate the head rotation distance of 50 AU, but one of the best is to consider that, even moving at the speed of light, commands transmitted from Earth take more than seven hours to to reach the spaceship.
“Looking back at the New Horizons flight from Earth at 50 AU seems almost like a dream,” Alan Stern, the spacecraft’s chief investigator, said in a NASA statement. “Most of us on the team were part of this mission, because it was just an idea and during that time our children grew up, and our parents, ourselves, grew up.”
They will age significantly even before New Horizons finishes its work. That piece of plutonium aboard the spacecraft is running its radio-thermal generator (RTG), a nuclear power source that should keep it running until the end of the 2030s. At that time, it will have more than doubled its current distance from of Earth, eventually leaving the solar system completely. In those years and beyond those miles, the ship will look for other objects in the Kuiper belt that could justify a visit and will study the space environment as it sails over increasingly sparse distances.
For all the miles New Horizons will set its odometer, it will never set the record for the longest distance a spacecraft will travel from Earth – the best thing it can do is come on the fifth. Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973, are at 129 AU and 105 AU, respectively. Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, are 152 and 127 AU away. Pioneers carry plates on the sides, identifying the planet that sent the ships and, using the sketches of a man and a woman, the ingenious species that invented them. Voyagers take a step further, carrying gold-plated recordings engraved with images and sounds of Earth, which will be revealed if an alien species ever intercepts the spacecraft and puts the recordings on nothing more high-tech than a turntable. New Horizons does not have such an elaborate commemorative marker – although the spacecraft serves itself as its own identifier, an object that was supposed to come from the mind and hands of an intelligent civilization.
All five ships could survive that civilization. And since Newtonian physics is Newtonian physics, all five should continue to fly forever – always spreading outward from our planet’s embarkation point, traversing hundreds and then thousands and then countless astronomical units. They are emissaries of the Earth, small metallic spores on Earth. If they surpass us, they will be among the few surviving records that mankind has ever passed. Even when their generators get cold and the ships are out of sight, they will remain, in a sense, our last best offer for immortality.