New Horizons Captures Record-Breaking Images in the Kuiper Belt
NASA
NASAs New Horizons spacecraft recently turned its telescopic camera toward a field of stars, snapped an image and made history.
The routine calibration frame of the Wishing Well galactic open star cluster, made by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Dec. 5, was taken when New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers, or 40.9 astronomical units) from Earth making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth.
New Horizons was even farther from home than NASAs Voyager 1 when it captured the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth. That picture was part of a composite of 60 images looking back at the solar system, on Feb. 14, 1990, when Voyager was 3.75 billion miles (6.06 billion kilometers, or about 40.5 astronomical units [AU]) from Earth. Voyager 1s cameras were turned off shortly after that portrait, leaving its distance record unchallenged for more than 27 years.
LORRI broke its own record just two hours later with images of Kuiper Belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 further demonstrating how nothing stands still when youre covering more than 700,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) of space each day.