NASA's New Horizons sets a record for capturing the farthest images from Earth, at a distance of 6.12 bn km

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has set a new record by capturing the farthest images from Earth by a spacecraft, surpassing the Voyager 1’s record of capturing an image when it was 6.06 billion km away from Earth. [caption id=“attachment_4343563” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image captured by NASA’s New Horizon. NASA.[/caption] The new images released by NASA on 8 February were captured by New Horizons when the spacecraft was more than 6.12 billion km away. “New Horizons has long been a mission of firsts, first to explore Pluto, first to explore the Kuiper Belt, fastest spacecraft ever launched,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “And now, we’ve been able to make images farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history,” Stern said. The routine calibration frame of the “Wishing Well” galactic open star cluster on 5 December was taken when New Horizons was 6.12 billion km from Earth, making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth, NASA said. New Horizons was even farther from home than NASA’s 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 14 February 1990, when Voyager was 6.06 billion km from Earth. Voyager 1’s cameras were turned off shortly after that portrait, leaving its distance record unchallenged for more than 27 years. About two hours later, New Horizons later broke the record again with images of Kuiper Belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85. They are also the closest-ever images of Kuiper Belt objects. New Horizons covers more than 1.1 million km of space each day (KBO).

See this image? It's the farthest image from Earth ever taken! Our @NASANewHorizons spacecraft – which is on its way to the distant, icy Kuiper Belt – took this image of objects in that region on Dec. 5 when it was 3.79 billion miles from our home planet: https://t.co/K8BOFWB6Oj pic.twitter.com/VhwInKxhUZ

— NASA (@NASA) February 8, 2018

On 9 December 2017, it carried out the most-distant course-correction manoeuver ever, as the mission team guided the spacecraft toward a close encounter with a KBO named 2014 MU69 on 1 January 2019. The coming New Year’s flight past MU69 will be the farthest planetary encounter in history, happening one billion miles beyond the Pluto system, which New Horizons famously explored in July 2015, NASA said.