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June 15, 2020 11:34 am

'Looking at an Alien Sky': New Horizons Probe Sees Stars From a New View

Long-time Slashdot reader JoeRobe writes: Space.com and other outlets are reporting on new pictures of Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri sent back from New Horizons. The images show clear parallax between the view from Earth and from the spacecraft 6.9 billion km away. In effect, New Horizons is looking up at a visually different star field than we are... NASA has even created stereoscopic pairs to get a 3D view. "It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said in a statement, according to Space.com:New Horizons captured the imagery on April 22 and April 23, when the probe was more than 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion kilometers) from its home planet. That's so far away that it took 6.5 hours for the data containing the photos, moving at the speed of light, to travel from New Horizons to mission scientists' inboxes... The parallax demonstration was not done for scientific purposes, Stern told Space.com (though he did note that the New Horizons imagery might find its way into textbooks that discuss the parallax effect). Rather, the main goal was public outreach and engagement, and a desire to provide us all with some cosmic poetry and perspective. We could get more such demonstrations, and much more data, from New Horizons in the coming years. The probe remains in good health and has enough fuel to fly by yet another object in the 2020s, if a suitable target can be found and NASA approves another mission extension, Stern and other team members have said. On Friday five New Horizons scientists answered questions on Reddit, including New Horizons contributing scientist and astrophysicist Brian May (also a guitarist for the rock group Queen). The team pointed out they could hypothetically maintain communication with their interplanetary space probe until it's 200 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is. (It's currently just 47 times as far...) "But power will run out before we get that far...somewhere near 100 times."

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