View of artist from the New Horizons Spatial Probe flying Pluto. © Nasa
Filing at the speed of around 50,000 km/h, the New Horizons probe is one of the most distant and fast objects that humanity has sent into space. After fleeing the fallen planet Pluto a decade ago, then the strange – and sweet – Arokoth, it is now patiently moving from the sun and is getting closer to other stars.
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New Horizons is therefore heading for interstellar space and a scientific team was able to ask him to be in relation to the tiny relative movement of the nearest suns.
Thanks to the NASA Eyes application, we can relive the approach of Arokoth by New Horizons. © Nasa
The New Horizons space probe sees the stars moving!
On this gif, we can see the movement of the stars Wolf 359 and Proxima Centaury thanks to the displacement of New Horizons compared to the earth. © NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/University of Louisville/Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Mt. Lemmon Observatory
This location method responds to the principle of “stellar parallax”: it is the apparent movement of an object that is based on two positions in space. To better represent it, imagine that you are advancing in the street: the objects near you will seem to be shifted in your field of vision and in relation to more distant objects. It is a parallax.
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The phenomenon of the illustrated parallax. The leading star seems to move to the left as the New Horizons probe moves away from the earth. © Pete Marenfeld, NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory
Today, New Horizons is at 62 astronomical units of the earth, 62 times the Earth-Sun distance (about 10 billion kilometers). Observe the displacement of the closer stars, here Proxima of the Centaur and Wolf 359, therefore allows you to orient yourself more precisely by being in the void of the cosmos. This is the principle of triangulation.
On the way to Proxima from the centaur?
Here, we observe the parallax obtained from the only star Wolf 359 to a few tens of astronomical units near. © NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/John Spencer/University of Louisville/Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Mt. Observatoire des lémmons
In absolute terms, New Horizons could therefore go to the star closest to our system. Admittedly, it would take him a few tens of thousands of years and fuel to adjust his trajectory. In reality, and except new budget cut ordered by Donald Trump to NASA, the operation of New Horizons is ensured until 2030, which is far too little for such an odyssey.
Building a database of parallaxs of close stars seen from the Kuiper belt nevertheless has a certain interest in future space missions. The more the data will be numerous and diverse, the precise the positions will be known, for example authorizing savings in ergols.
There are other extremely precise positioning methods, such as that using the signals received from pulsars, these stars who died in ultra rapid rotation and which emit a signal several tens of times per second with a regularity to make any jalousy any Swiss watchmaker.
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