In the NASA Kennedy Space Center’s payload hazardous maintenance facility, the New Horizons spacecraft sits at a workplace before its launch Credit – NASA / KSC
On January 19, 2006, the earth lost half a ton. More precisely, it lost 478 kg, but that’s good to round off, as the 13-kilogram planet barely noticed the sheer weight. The flyweight of matter is very much born of the planet, a collection of metal and silicon and copper and rubber and plastic and foil and a bit of plutonium put together in the New Horizons spacecraft. Launched on an Atlas V rocket, New Horizons tore off the earth at a staggering 58,500 km / h (36,400 km / h), a record speed that seemed very appropriate as the destination Pluto, 5 , 1 billion km.) Away. If you want to drive such a distance, it is best to make tracks.
New Horizons reaches Pluto on July 14, 2015 and becomes the first spacecraft to storm the dwarf planet. Less than four years later, on January 1, 2019, it passed the peanut-shaped, 36 km long Kuiper belt object known as Arrokoth, a rocky, icy body in the river of similar comet-like objects orbiting the solar system. . This meeting was also a first. We have known about the Kuiper Belt since astronomer Gerard Kuiper theorized its existence in 1951, but we have never visited it.
One small ship entering two space records should suffice. But New Horizons is going to make headlines again. Tomorrow at exactly 08:42 EDT it will pass an invisible line in space that will place it 7.5 billion kilometers from Earth. It takes out 50 astronomical units (AU) – or 50 times the distance from the earth to the sun – making New Horizons one of only a small handful of spacecraft to pass that cosmic milestone. There are many ways to consider what a head-turning distance of 50 AU is, but one of the best is to consider that the mission sent from Earth takes even more than seven hours to reach the spacecraft. .
“Looking back at the flight of New Horizons from Earth to 50 AU looks almost like a dream,” Alan Stern, the spacecraft’s chief investigator, said in a NASA statement. “Most of us in the team were part of this mission as it was just an idea, and over time our children grew up, and our parents, and ourselves, grew older.”
They will still grow significantly older before New Horizons finishes its work. That little bit of plutonium on board the spacecraft is running its radio-thermal generator (RTG), a nuclear power source that should make it work until the late 2030s. At that point, it would have more than doubled its current distance from the earth, eventually leaving the solar system completely. In those years and over those miles, the ship will be looking for other objects of the Kuiper belt that may warrant a visit, and he will study the space environment as it travels more and more rare distances.
For all the miles New Horizons places on its odometer, it will never set the record for the greatest distance a spacecraft will travel from Earth – the best it can do is reach fifth place. Launched in 1972 and 1973, Pioneer 10 and 11 are 129 AU and 105 AU respectively. Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, are 152 and 127 AU away. The pioneers carry on their sides plates identifying the planet that the ships sent, and using the drawings of a man and a woman the ingenious species they invented. The Voyagers go a step further, with gilded plates etched with images and sounds of the earth, which will be revealed as an alien species ever intercepting the spacecraft and placing the plates on nothing more technological than a turntable. New Horizons does not carry such an extensive memorial – although the spacecraft itself serves as its own identifier, an object that had to come from the mind and hands of an intelligent civilization.
All five ships could possibly survive civilization. And since Newtonian physics is Newtonian physics, all five must continue to fly forever – they must spread outward from the point of entry of our planet, cross hundreds and then thousands, and then count more astronomical units. They are missionaries from the earth, small metal traces from the earth. If they survive us, they will be one of the few surviving records that mankind has ever passed in this way. Even if their generators get cold and the ships wink, they will in a sense remain our last, best bid for immortality.