As the New Horizons spacecraft heads into interstellar space, it has now reached a historic milestone. On April 17, 2021, New Horizons exceeded 50 astronomical units, or 50 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. It’s only 5of the spaceship to reach that distance, joining Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.
“Although four other missions reached this distance in the 20th century, none were in perfect health, but New Horizons has them,” said Alan Stern, New Horizon’s chief investigator. on Twitter. “This is an amazing testament to the skill, care and attention to detail of those who designed and built New Horizons and those who have been its flight crew for over 15 years.”
This summer, it will be six years since New Horizons flew its Pluto and Moon system in July 2015.
To celebrate the achievement of this new distance marker, scientists sent instructions to New Horizons a few months ago to try to imagine the location of another deep space traveler, Voyager 1, which is 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.
“It’s an awfully beautiful picture for me,” Stern said.
By converting the AU scale to one we are more familiar with, New Horizons is now almost 5 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away. This means that communication with the spacecraft takes a long time
During the Pluto flight, two-way communication between New Horizons and Earth requires a nine-hour round trip – 4.5 hours to the spacecraft and another 4.5 back. Because radio signals travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second, 300,000 km per second), this exemplifies Pluto’s long distance from Earth, nearly three billion miles (4 billion km). And at the current distance, the signals take 7 hours to reach the distant spacecraft and another 7 hours before his control team on Earth finds out if the message has been received.
“Working with a spaceship so far is a challenge,” Alice Bowman told me in 2016 for my book “Incredible Stories from Space.” Bowman is the operations manager for the New Horizons mission at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory of Applied Physics, where New Horizons was built and operated. “I always say that you have to have a divided personality when working in operations (mission operations) because of all the variations of time. When you send a real-time command from Earth, you need to know where the spacecraft will be in the future. ”
The New Horizons team offered another 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 would be only four houses on the right. New Horizons now has 50 houses on the street, 17 houses beyond Pluto.
New Horizons is not finished with its mission at all. After Pluto flew, the spacecraft took its first overview of an object in the Kuiper Belt (KBO) flying past Arrokoth on New Year’s Day 2019. From its unique perch in the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons makes observations that can be made from anywhere else, even the stars look different from the spaceship’s point of view.
New Horizons collected data on the solar wind and space environment in the Kuiper Belt and searched for other objects in the Kuiper Belt, with an eye on visiting one that appears along the way, “at hand on fuel.” Stern said on Twitter. This summer, the mission team will release a software upgrade to enhance New Horizons’ scientific capabilities. For future exploration, the spacecraft’s nuclear battery should provide enough power to keep New Horizons running until the end of the 2030s.
Further reading and more images: JHUAPL
