{"id":18643,"date":"2018-02-08T22:10:02","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T14:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/3-8-billion-miles-new-horizons-spacecraft-sends-pictures-from-farthest-vantage-point\/"},"modified":"2018-02-08T22:10:02","modified_gmt":"2018-02-08T14:10:02","slug":"3-8-billion-miles-new-horizons-spacecraft-sends-pictures-from-farthest-vantage-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/3-8-billion-miles-new-horizons-spacecraft-sends-pictures-from-farthest-vantage-point\/","title":{"rendered":"3.8 billion miles! New Horizons spacecraft sends pictures from farthest vantage point"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Kuiper
These false-color images of two Kuiper Belt objects, 2012 HZ84 (left) and 2012 HE85 (right), helped give New Horizons\u2019 LORRI instrument the title of farthest-out working camera. (NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Two and a half years after becoming the first probe to study Pluto up close, NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft is gaining more fame for possessing the solar system\u2019s farthest-out camera in operation.<\/p>\n

Today NASA released a set of images captured by New Horizons\u2019 Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on Dec. 5 of last year, when the piano-sized probe was 3.79 billion miles from Earth.<\/p>\n

One of LORRI\u2019s pictures shows the \u201cWishing Well\u201d star cluster, a scattering of points of light that New Horizons could use for camera calibration purposes.<\/p>\n

Two hours later, LORRI looked at two objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects that New Horizons has been traveling through in the wake of its Pluto encounter. The \u201cWishing Well\u201d view and those two false-color images, showing the objects known as 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85, are what gave LORRI its record as the farthest-out camera.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew Horizons has long been a mission of firsts \u2014 first to explore Pluto, first to explore the Kuiper Belt, fastest spacecraft ever launched. And now we\u2019ve been able to make images farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history,\u201d mission principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said today in a news release.<\/p>\n

\"Wishing
This image, taken on Dec. 5, 2017, shows the \u201cWishing Well\u201d star cluster. (NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The record was previously held by NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which snapped the image data for the famous \u201cPale Blue Dot\u201d image on Feb. 14, 1990. That picture, the brainchild of the late physicist Carl Sagan, looked back at Earth from a distance of 3.75 billion miles.<\/p>\n

Voyager\u2019s cameras were turned off shortly afterward and are no longer being used, even though the probe continues to zoom through the solar system\u2019s fringe at a distance of 13.2 billion miles.<\/p>\n

New Horizons, in contrast, is just getting started. Or restarted. The probe is periodically in communication with the mission team as it closes in on its next target, a Kuiper Belt object (or perhaps even two paired objects) known as 2014 MU69. A Pluto-style flyby is scheduled for Jan. 1, 2019.<\/p>\n

By that time, 2014 MU69 is almost certain to have a nickname, thanks in part to a naming contest that\u2019s currently in the deliberation phase. For what it\u2019s worth, the most popular choice was Mj\u00f6lnir, which pays tribute to the hammer wielded by Thor, the Norse god (and Marvel movie star).<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen whether Mj\u00f6lnir passes muster with NASA and the International Astronomical Union. In the meantime, we\u2019ll always have 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These false-color images of two Kuiper Belt objects, 2012 HZ84 (left) and 2012 HE85 (right), helped give New Horizons\u2019 LORRI instrument the title of farthest-out working camera. (NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI Photo) Two and a half years after becoming the first probe to study Pluto up close, NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft is gaining more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2173,4809,2174,4810],"class_list":["post-18643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-kuiper-belt","tag-nasa-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons-probe"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18643"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}