At this distance, communications travel at the speed of light and of the 8 minutes it takes to get from the Moon to Earth, it takes several hours to reach the ground detectors.
We have to go back to 2006 when New Horizons was sent into space, which only took a few minutes for us to communicate with the spacecraft. It is now at a distance of approximately 7.5 billion kilometers, so it takes 7 hours for a message to reach Earth traveling at the speed of light.
A ship made to make history
This is an important milestone in deep space. NASA’s New Horizons mission that travels billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System has finally crossed the 50 astronomical unit mark (an astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance between Earth and the Sun, which means that it is now 50 times farther from us than it is from our star).
“It ‘s hard to imagine anything so far. One thing that makes this distance is tangible is how long it takes us on Earth to confirm that the spacecraft received our instructions. It went from being almost instantaneous to be of the order of 14 hours. Ago extreme distance is real, “says Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
It is not the first nor will it be the last
With this there are already five spaceships that manage to reach this distance in space. First, it was the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft and later the legendary Voyager 1 and 2 probes. All have passed through a remote region and, to commemorate this very special occasion of the New Horizons, destined to explore Pluto, its satellites and asteroids of the Kuiper Belt, the spacecraft photographed the field of stars where one of its space cousins, precisely the Voyager 1, appears from New Horizons unique position in the Kuiper Belt. Never before has a spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt photographed the location of another even more distant spacecraft, now in interstellar space. Although Voyager 1 is too faint to be seen directly in the image, its location is known precisely because of NASA’s radio tracking.
In fact, the two Voyager probes have left the solar system and are in interstellar space. Voyager 1 is the furthest spacecraft from Earth at about 152 astronomical units , three times farther than New Horizon.
“This is a hauntingly beautiful image for me,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, USA. “Looking back at the New Horizons flight from Earth at 50 AU almost seems like a dream somehow. Flying a spaceship through our entire Solar System to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt has never been done before New Horizons. Most of us on the team have been part of this mission as it was just an idea, and during that time our children have grown and our parents, and ourselves, have grown. But most importantly, we made a lot of scientific discoveries, inspired countless STEM careers, and even did a bit of history, “concluded the expert.
As a curiosity, launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons is still the fastest human-created object launched from Earth . This was due to its gravity-assisted flyby of Jupiter in 2007 that allowed it to reduce its trip to the dwarf planet Pluto by about three years.
The spacecraft has a lot of work ahead of it: it will continue to collect data on Uranus and Neptune, continue to characterize the environment of the Kuiper Belt, and, as long as it remains in good technological health, will show us the realms beyond the belt, the outer edge of which is believed to be about 70 astronomical units from the Sun. It is expected to reach 100 astronomical units away before its energy runs out in the late 2030s.
Reference: NASA
