NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Takes Record-Breaking Photos
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
I'll be the first to admit that the photos above don't look like much.
But for what it's worth, they're actually record-breaking photos taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
Taken by the craft's telescopic camera, the images are of two objects in the Kuiper Belt - KBO 2012 HZ84 on the left and 2012 HE85 on the right.
New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped the images on December 5, 2017, when the spacecraft was more than 3.79 billion miles from Earth.
That means that these photos are the farthest images ever taken from our home planet, unseating Voyager 1's "Pale Blue Dot" photo of Earth, which was taken on February 14, 1990. The video below from NASA recounts that photo:
New Horizons is setting records on a constant basis, as it's only the fifth spacecraft to ever travel beyond the outer planets of our solar system.
In addition to its record-breaking photos, it also holds the record for the furthest course-correction maneuver. That occurred when the mission team rerouted the craft so it can get a closer look at a Kuiper Belt Object called 2014 MU69, which will occur on January 1, 2019.
When that happens, it will be the most distant planetary flyby ever, at a distance of one billion miles beyond Pluto.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
New Horizons has been exploring the Kuiper Belt since last year, after having visited Pluto in 2015.
While it's there, the craft is tasked with taking a closer look at more than two dozen objects, including dwarf planets and Centaurs, which are former Kuiper Belt Objects that have an unstable orbit.
The images taken by the spacecraft are analyzed by scientists to determine how the objects in the Kuiper Belt are shaped, what their surface properties might be, and to search for new features, like as-yet-undiscovered moons and rings.
The image above, for example, was taken by the LORRI camera of a star cluster called the "Wishing Well." It was a record-breaking photo in itself, only to be usurped as the furthest photo ever taken from Earth by the twin images featured at the top of this article just two hours later.
At the moment, New Horizons is in an electronic sleep mode, and will remain as such until June 4, 2018, when mission controllers at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory will wake it up in preparation for the encounter of MU69 on New Year's Day 2019.
To follow the progress of New Horizons, visit the mission page.
Via NASA