New Horizons halfway from Pluto to the next target

New Horizons halfway from Pluto to the next target

In preparing for the arrival of the New Horizons by 2014 MU69, on January 1, 2019, LORRI camera created a series of 10-second exposures of the background star field near the Kuiper Belt Target (KBO). The image was created from 45 expositions made on January 28, 2017. Yellow inset - the predicted position of the MU69 at the time of arrival of the ship. KMO is located 877 million kilometers from the ship (this is even more than the LORRI camera can see).

We live in the era of space exploration and everything seems possible when you watch a ship rush at a speed of 32,000 miles per hour. The NASA New Horizons apparatus continues to wade to the outer areas of our system. He managed to overcome half the distance from the Pluto (the first target) to the asteroid 2014 MU69 in the Kuiper belt (KBO). On-site, he plans to be January 1, 2019. It is separated from the asteroid by 782.45 million km. “This flight will set a new record for the development of the farthest world,” said Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons.

The device slows down because it is moving away from solar gravity.

Sleeping

New Horizons will set a record hibernation time this week. In fact, the ship will sleep from April to arrival at MU69. A 157-day sleep is a well-deserved reward for a device that has not stopped for 2.5 years (since December 6, 2014). During this time, he managed to meet with Pluto and 16 months to transmit data about the dwarf, and also remotely observed the Kuiper belt objects and collected unique information about the dust and the environment in the belt and investigated the gaseous hydrogen surrounding the Sun (heliosphere) .

Now the device is 5.7 billion km away from us, so the radio signal from the management team takes 5 hours and 20 minutes to get to it. All systems are functioning normally.

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