NASA’s New Horizons Reach a Rare Spatial Milestone

NASA's New Horizons Reach a Rare Spatial Milestone

Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, en route to a January 2019 encounter with the object of the 2014 Kuiper belt MU69. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

In the weeks after its launch in early 2006, when NASA’s New Horizons were still close to home, it only took a few minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft and hear back that the computer was on board. received the instructions and was ready to execute.

When New Horizons crossed the solar system, and the distance from Earth jumped from millions to millions of miles, the time between contacts grew from a few minutes to a few hours. And on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 08:42 EDT) New Horizons will reach a rare depth milestone – 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than the earth is.

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 almost 7 billion kilometers away; a remote region where one of the radio commands, even at the speed of light, needs seven hours to reach the distant spacecraft. Then add another seven hours before his control team on earth finds out if the message has been received.

“It’s hard to think of something like that,” said Alice Bowman, the New Horizons operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “One thing that makes this distance tangible is how long it takes for us on Earth to confirm that the spacecraft received our instructions. It went from almost instantaneous to now in the order of 14 hours. It really makes the extreme distance . ”

To celebrate the occasion, New Horizons recently photographed the star field where one of its long-distance cousins, Voyager 1, appears from the unique seat of New Horizons in the Kuiper Belt. Never before has a spacecraft in the Kuiper belt photographed the location of an even more distant spacecraft, now in interstellar space. Although Voyager 1 is far too faint to be seen directly in the image, its location is known precisely because of NASA’s radio tracking.

NASA's New Horizons Reach a Rare Spatial Milestone

Hello, Voyager! From the distant Kuiper belt at the boundary of the solar system, on Christmas Day, December 25, 2020, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft pointed its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager in the direction of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, whose location with the yellow circle marked. Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object and 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 was 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 objects in the image are stars, but several of them, with a vague appearance, are distant galaxies. New Horizons reaches the 50 AU point 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

“It’s a haunting image to me,” said Alan Stern, chief researcher at New Horizons of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

“Looking back at the flight of New Horizons from Earth to 50 AU seems almost in a way like a dream,” he continued. “Flying a spacecraft over our entire solar system to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt had never been done before New Horizons. Most of us in the team were part of this mission as it was just an idea , and during this time our children were growing up, and our parents, and ourselves, were getting older, but most importantly, we made many scientific discoveries, inspired countless STEM careers, and even made some history. . ‘

New Horizons is practically designed to make history. New Horizons was sent on January 19, 2006 at 58,400 miles per hour (58,500 kilometers per hour) and was and still is the fastest man-made object ever launched from Earth. Jupiter’s gravity assistance in February 2007 not only shaved off about three years of its journey to Pluto, but also created the best view of Jupiter’s faint ring and captured the first film of a volcano erupting anywhere in the solar system. except the earth.

New Horizons successfully launched the first reconnaissance of the Pluto system in July 2015, followed by the farthest flight in history – and the first closer look at a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) – with its flight past Arrokoth on New Year’s Day 2019. From its unique seat in the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons makes observations that can be made nowhere else; even the stars look different from the point of view of the spacecraft.

New Horizons team members use giant telescopes like the Japanese Subaru Observatory to scan the sky for another potential (and long-range) CBO flight target. New Horizons itself stays healthy and collects data on the solar wind and space environment in the Kuiper Belt Kuiper Belt objects and distant planets such as Uranus and Neptune. This summer, the mission team will launch a software upgrade to advance the scientific capabilities of New Horizons. For future research, the spacecraft’s nuclear battery should provide enough power to operate New Horizons until the late 2030s.


When I look back on a New Horizons New Year’s to remember


Quotation: NASA’s New Horizons Reach a Rare Space Milestone (2021, April 19), Retrieved April 19, 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2021-04-nasa-horizons-rare-space-milestone.html

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