Pluto Explorer New Horizons reaches Milestone and Sends Home Special Picture

New Horizons is currently exploring the Kuiper Belt following its successful rendezvous with Pluto and Kuiper belt object Ultima Thule , the spacecraft is now 50 times the distance that Earth is from the Sun away from home making it just the fifth spacecraft to reach such a distance behind Voyagers 1 and 2 and Pioneers 10 and 11.
To mark the occasion NASA have released this picture from New Horizons looking from the Kuiper Belt to where it's older sibling , Voyager 1 , is currently located , of course we can't see Voyager 1 because it's small and far away but the picture is the first of its kind and a mark of how far we've come in just the past few decades.

“That’s a hauntingly beautiful image to me,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

“Looking back at the flight of New Horizons from Earth to 50 AU almost seems in some way like a dream,” he continued. “Flying a spacecraft across our entire solar system to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt had never been done before New Horizons. Most of us on the team have been a part of this mission since it was just an idea, and during that time our kids have grown up, and our parents, and we ourselves, have grown older. But most importantly, we made many scientific discoveries, inspired countless STEM careers, and even made a little history.”

Meanwhile New Horizons continues on with the team looking for new objects for it to explore , there's a few years of life left in the old girl.

New Horizons team members use giant telescopes like the Japanese Subaru observatory to scan the skies for another potential (and long-shot) KBO flyby target, New Horizons itself remains healthy, collecting data on the solar wind and space environment in the Kuiper Belt, other Kuiper Belt objects, and distant planets like Uranus and Neptune. This summer, the mission team will transmit a software upgrade to boost New Horizons’ scientific capabilities. For future exploration, the spacecraft’s nuclear battery should provide enough power to keep New Horizons operating until the late-2030s.
www.nasa.gov...

a reply to: gortex

Very cool - THANK YOU Gortex for keeping your eye on things happening "out there"

a reply to: gortex

it looks like white dots. What am I looking at? What is that black UFO under the circle? What is the circle about?

a reply to: PapagiorgioCZ

The white dots are Stars , the green circle is the area of Space where Voyagers 1 is and the black UFO is an image artifact.

Funny, I'm teaching about Pluto in two weeks time as part of my Chakra Trilogy course.
Synchronicity and all that!

Thank you for posting. Shared the article with my students to whet their juices as they say.
Rainbows
Jane

a reply to: gortex

So, is it looking forward or looking back towards the sun?

a reply to: lostbook

I read about this in some astronomy news site the other day, and they specifically stated that it is looking AWAY from the sun, because even at that distance, the camera cannot handle the amount of light from the sun and it would be destroyed.