New Horizons Reaches Deep-Space Milestone, Snaps Photo
New Horizons Reaches Deep-Space Milestone, Snaps Photo By Ryan Whitwam on April 19, 2021 at 10:07 am
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NASA’s New Horizons probe has already made history a few times since its 2006 launch. At the time, Pluto was a planet, but it had become a dwarf planet when New Horizons beamed back the first close-up photos of it in 2015. After that, the probe flew deeper into the Kuiper Belt and delivered the first images of Arrokoth. Now, it’s only the fifth human-made object to reach a distance of 50 astronomical units. In celebration, New Horizons snapped a photo of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Well, it tried, but Voyager 1 is still way out in the lead.
Spaceflight Insider
Laurel Kornfeld
The Hubble Space Telescope, imaged during its last servicing mission in 2009. Credit: NASA
During its 31 years of activity, the Hubble Space Telescope has been “one of the most successful scientific experiments in history,” used to research numerous fields of astronomy ranging from cosmology and the expansion of the universe to the characterization of exoplanets, said astronomer Tom Brown of the Space Telescope Science Institute in a March 2 online presentation.
A joint NASA/European Space Agency project, Hubble launched in 1990. Through servicing missions conducted between then and 2009, it became increasingly more powerful.
The telescope orbits the Earth at an altitude of 333 miles (536 kilometers) and takes 95 minutes to circle the planet. It is powered by solar arrays when traversing Earth’s day side and batteries when passing over its night side.