As the spaceship New Horizons speeds towards interstellar space, it has now reached a historic milestone. On April 17, 2021, New Horizons passed 50 astronomical units, or 50 times the distance of the earth from the sun. It is only the fifth spaceship to reach this distance, joining Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.
“While four other missions reached this distance in the 20th century, none were in excellent health, New Horizons was,” New Horizon’s chief investigator Alan Stern said on Twitter. “This is amazing evidence of the skill, care, and attention to detail of those who designed and built New Horizons and those who have been the flight crew for over 15 years.”
This summer, it will be six years since New Horizons flew past Pluto and its lunar system in July 2015.
On Christmas Day, December 25, 2020, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft directed its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager in the direction of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the position of which is marked with the yellow circle, from the distant Kuiper Belt on the border of the solar system. Photo credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute.
To celebrate the achievement of this new distance marker, a few months ago scientists sent instructions to New Horizons to attempt to map the location of another space traveler, Voyager 1, who is now in interstellar space. Although Voyager 1 is far too weak to be seen directly in the picture, its location is precisely known from NASA’s radio tracking.
“That is a breathtakingly beautiful picture for me,” said Stern.
New Horizons is converting the AU scale to one we are more familiar with and is now nearly 7.5 billion kilometers away. This means that communication with the spaceship will take a long time
At the time of Pluto’s flyby, bi-directional communication between New Horizons and Earth required a nine-hour round trip – 4.5 hours to the spacecraft and another 4.5 hours back. Since radio signals travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second, 300,000 km per second), this is an example of Pluto’s great distance from Earth, nearly 4 billion km. At the current distance, the signals will take 7 hours to reach the distant spaceship and another 7 hours before the control team on Earth can determine whether the message has been received.
Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hitting a Pluto-like object in the distant Kuiper Belt. Credits: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Alex Parker
“Working with such a distant spaceship is a challenge,” Alice Bowman told me in 2016 for my book “Incredible Stories from Space”. Bowman is New Horizons Mission Operations Manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where New Horizons was built and operates. “I always say that you have to have a split personality when you work in Ops (Mission Operations) because of all the timing differences. When sending a real-time command from Earth, you need to know where the spaceship will be in the future. ”
The New Horizons team provided another way to imagine how far 50 AU is: think of the solar system laid out on a neighborhood street. The sun is one house to the left of “home” (or earth), Mars would be the next house to the right, and Jupiter would be only four houses to the right. New Horizons would be 50 houses down the street now, 17 houses behind Pluto.
New Horizons is far from finished with its mission. After Pluto passed by, the spaceship took a close look at a Kuiper Belt (KBO) item on New Year’s Day 2019 as it flew past Arrokoth. From its unique location in the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons makes observations that ‘They cannot be made from anywhere else, even if the stars look different from the spacecraft’s point of view.
New Horizons has been collecting data on the solar wind and space environment in the Kuiper Belt and has searched for other Kuiper Belt objects to visit one that appears “within reach of the fuel” along the way. Stern said on Twitter. This summer, the mission team will be submitting a software upgrade to improve New Horizons’ science skills. For future exploration, the spacecraft’s nuclear battery should provide enough power to keep New Horizons running through the late 2030s.
Further reading and further pictures: JHUAPL
The close-up of the back of Pluto, taken by New Horizons, shows multiple layers of haze in the mostly nitrogenous atmosphere. Photo credit: NASA.
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