New Horizons Reaches Depth Milestone, Snapshot

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NASA’s New Horizons probe has already made history several times since its launch in 2006. At the time, Pluto was a planet, but it became a dwarf planet when New Horizons irradiated its first close-up photos back in 2015. After that, the sin flew deeper into the Kuiper Belt, yielding the first images of Arrokoth. . It is now only the fifth man-made object to reach a distance of 50 astronomical units. In celebration, New Horizons took a photo of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Well, it tried, but Voyager 1 is still ahead.

New Horizons now joins the 50 AU club with Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. It would have taken too much fuel to slow down New Horizons at Pluto, so it just kept trucks going. It provided the opportunity to visit the fascinating Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), known as Arrokoth, which blew it away on New Year’s Day 2019.

An astronomical unit (AU) is equal to the distance between the earth and the sun, about 150 million kilometers. Pluto is only shy of 30 AU away, and New Horizons has reached it within nine years. The launch in 2006 set a record for the fastest ever, and that record holds to this day. And it’s still one of the fastest things we’ve ever built. It has enough speed to escape the solar system, but it will never overtake Voyager. New Horizons moves at 13 kilometers per second, but Voyager’s multiple gravity assistants accelerate it to 17 kilometers per second.

The location of Voyager 1, as seen by New Horizons.

After reaching 50 AU, NASA turned New Horizon’s camera to Voyager 1 and snapped a photo (above). You can not see the space probe of 1977, which is about a trillion times too dull. However, it would be right in the middle, as indicated by the circle.

New Horizons is still healthy, and NASA hopes it can intercept another CBO. Teams on Earth use powerful telescopes such as the Japanese Subaru Observatory to scan the spacecraft’s path to see if there are viable targets. Regardless of whether there is another CBO in the future of sin, it has a long life ahead. NASA will send updated software to New Horizons this summer to advance its scientific capabilities. Its nuclear battery should allow it to broadcast until the late 2030s.

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