New Horizons captures an image of the chicken as it approaches milestone from the sun

Somewhere inside the yellow circle is the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Somewhere in there yellow circle is the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
Image: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute

With Pluto firmly in its rearview mirror, New Horizons is now hours away from reaching a milestone distance, in which sin will be 50 times farther from the sun than the earth. To commemorate the achievement, the spacecraft has performed a task never before attempted at the edge of the solar system.

On April 20 at 20:42 EDT, New Horizons will be 50 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, with 1 AU being the average distance Earth to the sun, or about 150 million kilometers.

As a milestone, this number is completely arbitrary and satisfactory for our base-10 sensitivity, but it represents a rare achievement: New Horizons now joins an elite group of spacecraft that have reached this distance, the others being Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2. Of these, Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object ever., currently at 152.5 AU from the sun, or 22.9 billion km.

New Horizons now joins an elite group of spacecraft to reach 50 astronomical units.

New Horizons now joins an elite group of spacecraft to reach 50 astronomical units.
Graphic: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute

Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons is now nearly 7 billion kilometers from Earth. At this distance it takes seven hours to reach the earth, which means that it now takes 14 hours to transmit instructions to sin and then receive a confirmation signal on earth again. Sin is so far from home that its view of distant stars now appears else compared to ours.

NASA celebrated the achievement by pointing New Horizons’ camera to the location in space where Voyager 1 is currently located.

“Never before has a spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt 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 faint to be seen directly in the image, its location is known precisely because of NASA’s radio tracking.”

The artist's impression of New Horizons.

The artist’s impression of New Horizons.
Image: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, describe it as a ‘ghostly image’, and I tend to agree. The photo reminds us that we are in the early stages of becoming an interstellar species and that our reach into the cosmos deepens with each passing day.

Previous milestones in the New Horizons mission include the flybys of Jupiter in 2007 and Pluto in 2015, as well as a meeting with the oddly shaped Arrokoth in 2019.

From here, sin will continue to dare in the outer parts of the solar system. The scientific phase of the mission continues much further, as the probe collects important data on solar wind and the spatial environment. NASA plans to upgrade New Horizons’ software later this year to improve their capabilities. The probe is expected to last until at least the late 2030s, after which the nuclear battery will no longer sustain the interstellar vehicle.

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