With Pluto firmly in the rearview mirror, New Horizons is now a few hours away from reaching a significant distance, in which the probe will be 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth. To commemorate the achievement, the spacecraft performed an unprecedented task at the edge of the solar system.
At 8:42 pm EDT on Saturday, April 17, 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 entirely arbitrary and pleasing to our core-10 sensibilities, but it is a rare achievement: New Horizons is now joining an elite group of spacecraft that has reached this distance, the others being Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2. Of these, Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object ever, at the moment at 152.5 AU from the Sun, or 14.2 billion miles (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 light seven hours to reach Earth, which means that it now takes 14 hours to transmit the probe’s instructions and then receive a confirmation signal back to Earth. The probe is so far from home that his vision of distant stars now appears different compared to ours.
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NASA celebrated the achievement by directing the New Horizons camera to its current location in Voyager 1.
“No Kuiper Belt spacecraft has ever photographed the location of an even more distant spacecraft, now in interstellar space,” NASA said in a statement. statement. “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.”
Alan Stern, principal investigator at New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, described it’s an “obsessively 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 expanse in the cosmos becomes deeper with each passing day.
Previous stages in the New Horizons mission include his mission flybys of Jupiter in 2007 and Pluto in 2015, as well as a meeting with strange shape Arrokoth in 2019.
From here, the probe will continue to venture outside the solar system. The scientific phase of the mission is still very much underway, as the spacecraft collects important data about the solar wind and the space environment. NASA plans to update the New Horizons software later this year to increase its capabilities. The survey is expected to last at least until the end of the 2030s, after which the nuclear battery will no longer support the interstellar vehicle.