New Horizon takes an amazing new space photo
However, it must be asserted that this number is completely arbitrary but represents a very rare result: New Horizons now joins an elite group of spacecraft that have reached such a distance, the others they are Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2. Of these, Voyager 1 is the farthest object ever built by man, currently 152.5 AU from the Sun, or 22.9 billion km (you can visit, at this link, the New Horizon website to be updated. on the journey).
Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons is now approximately 7.5 billion kilometers from Earth. At this distance, light takes seven hours to reach Earth, which means it now takes 14 hours to transmit instructions to the spacecraft and then receive a confirmation signal back to Earth. The probe is so far from home that its vision of distant stars now looks different than ours. NASA celebrated the result by pointing the New Horizons camera at the point in space where Voyager 1 is currently located.
Image: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute “Never before has a vehicle spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt photographed the position of an even more distant spacecraft, now in interstellar space, ”NASA said in a statement. "Although Voyager 1 is too faint to be seen directly in the image, its location is precisely known due to NASA's radio tracking."
Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, described the photo as "an incredibly beautiful image". The photo reminds us that we are in the early stages of our interstellar experience and that our knowledge of the cosmos becomes deeper with each passing day.
