NASA’s New Horizons Conducts the First Interstellar Parallax Experiment

[Nikola Bijeliti]

NASA’s New Horizons Conducts the First Interstellar Parallax Experiment

For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we'd see from Earth.

More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. “It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “And that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before — to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth.”

This two-frame animation of Proxima Centauri blinks back and forth between New Horizons and Earth images of each star, clearly illustrating the different view of the sky New Horizons has from its deep-space perch.




This two-frame animation of Wolf 359 blinks back and forth between New Horizons and Earth images of each star, clearly illustrating the different view of the sky New Horizons has from its deep-space perch.




Stereo for 3D Glasses: These anaglyph images can be viewed with red-blue stereo glasses to reveal the stars' distance from their backgrounds. On the left is Proxima Centauri and on the right is Wolf 359.

[Ray Allan]

I hope NASA will have New Horizons' cameras look back and take another 'Family Portrait' of the Solar System like Voyager 1 did back in 1990. At the time Voyager was 13 years into its flight and roughly the same distance (3-4 billion miles) from Earth as NH is now. A new 'Pale Blue Dot' photo of Earth would be great.

[Ray Allan]

Originally Posted by Ray Allan

I hope NASA will have New Horizons' cameras look back and take another 'Family Portrait' of the Solar System like Voyager 1 did back in 1990. At the time Voyager was 13 years into its flight and roughly the same distance (3-4 billion miles) from Earth as NH is now. A new 'Pale Blue Dot' photo of Earth would be great.

Further research has found this:

Looking back at the centre of the Solar System - and directly at the Sun - poses some risk to the sensitive detectors in the probe's long-range camera, however. So, no imaging effort will occur until New Horizon's main mission objectives are achieved.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51491471

Voyager 1 took its pictures long after its main planetary flyby objectives were achieved, and its camera was shut down shortly after the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken to conserve power. New Horizons' nuclear power source should keep the spacecraft operating into the 2030s, so maybe they can try it sometime before the probe's power and fuel are exhausted.