Space & Astronomy

Probe takes farthest ever images from Earth

By T.K. Randall
February 12, 2018 ·  2 comments

A false-color image of Kuiper Belt object 2012 HZ84. Image Credit: NASA More than two years after its ground-breaking flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft has set a new world record by taking a series of photographs at a distance further from Earth than any other spacecraft before it.

The previous record holder was Voyager 1 which famously captured the 'Pale Blue Dot' image of the Earth on February 14, 1990 at a distance of 3.75 billion miles from home.

New Horizons, by contrast, has taken a photograph of the Wishing Well star cluster using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager instrument while situated 3.79 billion miles from Earth.It broke its own record again two hours later with images of two Kuiper Belt objects.

"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.

"And now, we've been able to make images farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history."

Source: EarthSky.org | Comments (2)

Tags: New Horizons