As the New Horizons spacecraft continues to hurtle towards exiting the Kuiper Belt, it has now reached a milestone. The spacecraft has passed 50 astronomical units, which means it has covered a distance that is 50 times Earth’s distance from the Sun. It has also become only the fifth spacecraft to do so, joining the Voyagers 1 and 2 and the Pioneers 10 and 11.
“Although four other missions reached this distance back in the 20th Century, none was in perfect health, but New Horizons is,” tweeted Alan Stern, New Horizon’s principal investigator. “This is an amazing testament to the skill, care, and attention to detail of those who designed and built New Horizons and those who have been its flight crew now for over 15 years.”
New Horizons to chronicle Voyager 1’s location
In July, it will mark the sixth anniversary of New Horizons making a flyby of Pluto and its Moons. To celebrate the new milestone, scientists sent instructions a few months ago to New Horizons to capture the location of Voyager 1, another deep-space traveler. Although it’s too distant to be seen directly in the image, its location is known, thanks to NASA’s radio-tracking.
In familiar distance scales, New Horizons is almost 7.5 billion kilometers away from the sun, which also means that communicating with it needs a lot of time. During the Pluto flyby, building a two-way communication took nine hours. Since radio signals travel at light speed, at current distance, it takes seven hours for the signal to reach the spacecraft and another seven hours to find out if the message was received.
The mission isn’t over yet
However, this new achievement is nowhere close to New Horizons’ mission. After passing by Pluto, the spacecraft thoroughly examined the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) with its flight past Arrokoth in 2019. The spacecraft is making observations in the Kuiper Belt that aren’t possible from anywhere else.
