NASA Breaks Record For Pictures Taken Farthest From Earth

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made history again.

NASA
These December 2017 false-color images of KBOs 2012 HZ84 (left) and 2012 HE85 are, for now, the farthest from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. They're also the closest-ever images of Kuiper Belt objects. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)
NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just one-upped the legendary Voyager 1. In 2015, New Horizons flew by Pluto and beamed back those amazing pictures. And now, the probe is flying along at more than 700,000 miles each day, moving farther and farther out into our solar system. And in the meantime, it broke a record set by Voyager 1 in 1990. NASA released a statement saying that New Horizons snapped a picture of a group of stars known as the “Wishing Well” when the spacecraft was about 3.79 billion miles from Earth. Then, it broke its own record a couple hours later that same day by taking images of two space rocks in the Kuiper Belt — a disc-shaped region beyond Neptune that may be home to hundreds of thousands of icy worlds and a trillion or more comets, according to CNN. Voyager 1 was 3.75 billion miles from Earth when it took the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth in 1990. NASA says Voyager 1’s cameras were turned off after that, so the photography record has remained unchallenged for more than 27 years.

“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, the mission’s principal investigator, said in the NASA statement, according to CNN. “And now, we’ve been able to make images farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history.”

The InsideHook Newsletter.

News, advice and insights for the most interesting person in the room.