NASA says its New Horizons spacecraft made an image using its telescopic camera to make an image 3.79 billion miles from Earth, which makes it the farthest one ever made from our planet.
The U.S. space agency reports in a news release that the New Horizons made the image back in December 2017 using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. The telescopic camera actually beat its own record that it had set two hours before on the same day with an image of the "Wishing Well" cluster," NASA reports.
The image at the top of the page is of several Kuiper Belt objects including some far-out dwarf planets and Centaurs, the space agency reports. Not only is the image at the top of this article the farthest ever made from Earth, but is the closest we've ever seen of Kuiper Belt objects.
The previous record -- not set on Dec. 9, 2017 -- came from the beloved Voyager 1 back in February 1990 with its "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth from 3.75 billion miles from home. NASA reports that the cameras on the Voyager 1 were turned off shortly after that image was made, which kept the record intact for nearly 30 years.
"New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to speed beyond the outer planets, so many of its activities set distance records," the space agency reports in the release. "On Dec. 9 it carried out the most-distant course-correction maneuver ever, as the mission team guided the spacecraft toward a close encounter with a KBO named 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019.
"That 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."
3.79 billion miles from Earth, #NewHorizons snapped these images of a pair of Kuiper Belt objects, making them the farthest images ever taken by a spacecraft!
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LEARN MORE >> https://t.co/tjdkzAD2Mipic.twitter.com/T1JNo4EmoZ
-- NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) February 8, 2018
As for what the New Horizons spacecraft is going nearly 4 billion miles from Earth, NASA reports that it started an extended mission in the Kuiper Belt last year. It has the goal of observing "at least two-dozen" more Kuiper Belt objects.
The U.S. space agency says the spacecraft is currently healthy and in hibernation, as the team behind it at Johns Hopkins plan to wake it up on June 4 of this year to prepare for its impending encounter with MU69.
"New Horizons has long been a mission of firsts -- first to explore Pluto, first to explore the Kuiper Belt, fastest spacecraft ever launched," Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons, said in the release,
"And now, we've been able to make images farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history."
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