NASA’s New Horizons reaches a rare stage in space

In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA’s New Horizons was still close to home, it took just a few minutes to send a command to the spacecraft 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 will reach a rare space mile point – 50 astronomical units from the sun, or 50 times farther away. Sun than the Earth.

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 where one of those radio commands, even traveling at the speed of light, takes seven hours to reach the distant spacecraft. 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. It has gone from almost instantaneous to now being on the order of 14 hours. It makes the distance extremely 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.

“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 at that time our children grew up, and our parents, and ourselves, got older. But most importantly, we’ve made a lot of scientific discoveries, inspired countless STEM careers, and even made a little history. “

New Horizons was basically designed to make history. Shipped at 58,400 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.

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 an object in the Kuiper Belt (KBO) – with its flight past Arrokoth 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.

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 environment in the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper belt and distant planets such as 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 for New Horizons to operate by the end of the 2030s.