The artist’s impression on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, on its way to a January 2019 meeting with the object of the 2014 Kuiper Belt MU69. Credit: NASA
In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when GODMOTHERNew Horizons was still close to home, it only took a few minutes to send a command to the spaceship and hear back that the on-board computer had received and was ready to execute the instructions.
As New Horizons traversed the solar system and its distance from Earth jumped from millions to billions of miles, that time between contacts increased from a few minutes to a few hours. And on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or on April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons reached a rare mile post in deep space – 50 astronomical units of the Sun, or 50 times farther of the Sun than is the Earth.
The scale of the solar system
Here’s a way to imagine how far 50 AU is: Think of the solar system sitting on a neighborhood street; The sun is a house on the left “home” (or Earth), Mars would be the next house on the right and Jupiter there would be only four houses on the right. New Horizons would have 50 houses on the street, 17 houses across the street Pluto!
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 region that one of those radio commands, even traveling at the speed of light, needs seven hours to reach the distant spaceship. Then add another seven hours before his Earth control team finds out if the message has been received.
“It’s hard to imagine anything so far,” said Alice Bowman, operations manager for 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 us on Earth to confirm that the spacecraft has received our instructions. This has gone from almost instantaneous to now being on the order of 14 hours. It makes the extreme distance real. ”
To mark the occasion, New Horizons recently photographed the star field in which one of its long-distance cousins, Voyager 1, appears in the unique New Horizons perch in the Kuiper Belt. Never before has a Kuiper Belt spacecraft photographed the location of an even more distant spacecraft, now in interstellar space. Although Voyager 1 is far too weak to be seen directly in the image, its location is known precisely because of NASA’s radio tracking.
Hi, Voyager! From the distant Kuiper belt at the frontier of the solar system, on Christmas Day, December 25, 2020, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft aimed its long-range reconnaissance image in the direction of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, whose location is marked with a yellow circle . Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object and the first spacecraft to actually leave the solar system, is more than 152 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun – about 14.1 billion miles or 22.9 billion kilometers – and it was 11.2 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from New Horizons when this image was taken. Voyager 1 itself is about 1 trillion times too faint to be visible in this image. Most of the objects in the image are stars, but many of them, with a blurred appearance, are distant galaxies. New Horizons will reach 50 AU on April 18, 2021 and will join Voyagers 1 and 2 in interstellar space in the 2040s. Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute
“This is an obsessively beautiful picture for me,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator at New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
“Looking back at the New Horizons flight from Earth at 50 AU seems almost like a dream,” he continued. “The flight of a spacecraft across our entire solar system to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt had never been done before New Horizons. 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. But most importantly, I made many scientific discoveries, inspired countless STEM careers, and even made a little history. ”
New Horizons was basically designed to make history. Dispatched at a speed of 36,400 miles per hour (58,500 kilometers per hour) on January 19, 2006, New Horizons was and still is the fastest man-made object ever launched from Earth. Jupiter’s gravitational assistance flight in February 2007 not only shaved about three years after its trip to Pluto, but allowed it to achieve the best views ever on Jupiter’s faint ring and capture the first film of a volcano. which erupted anywhere in the solar system except Earth.
Currently exploring the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto, New Horizons is just one of five spacecraft to reach 50 astronomical units – 50 times the distance between the Sun and Earth – at the exit of the solar system and, finally, in space. interstellar. Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute
New Horizons successfully completed the first exploration of the Pluto system in July 2015, followed by the farthest flight in history – and the first close-up view of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) – with its last Arrokoth flight on New Year’s Day. 2019. From its unique perch in the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons makes observations that can’t be made anywhere; even the stars look different from the spaceship’s point of view.
Artistic conception of the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Laboratory of Applied Physics / Southwest Research Institute
New Horizons team members use huge telescopes such as the Japanese Subaru Observatory to scan the sky for another potential (and long-term) KBO target, New Horizons itself remains healthy, collecting data on the solar wind and space in the Kuiper Belt, other Objects from Kuiper belt and distant planets as well Uranus and Neptune. This summer, the mission team will submit a software upgrade to enhance the scientific capabilities of New Horizons. For future exploration, the spacecraft’s nuclear battery should provide enough power to keep New Horizons running until the end of the 2030s.