NASA New Horizons Vessel Contacts Earth

NASA New Horizons

It has been almost 13 years since NASA launched their New Horizons craft. Its mission was rather simple. Go out there and see what you can find! More specifically, the intention is that it may hopefully shed some light as to the origin of our solar system. Yes, it’s one of those ‘big questions’.

In a report via SkyNews, however, after making a fly-by of the most distant world ever studied, the New Horizons vessel has checked in to say hello to Planet Earth. It did this, incidentally, from over 4 billion miles away.

Incredible Stuff!

Now, I don’t pretend to know the inner workings of space, physics or any of that jazz. I am, however, amazed that such a signal is possible over a distance this huge. To put this into context, even as far as Pluto is from Earth, this vessel is currently an additional 1 billion miles away. After going quiet for 10 hours while its signal was blocked though, it successfully made its pass and NASA is clearly delighted.

We should note that the Voyager probe is roughly around 12 billion miles away from us now.

Ultima Thule

Ultime Thule is currently the most distant world we have been able to discover and study. As such, even this early step is quite an achievement.

Lead scientist Alan Stern has said: “Ultima Thule is in such a deep freeze that it is perfectly preserved from its original formation. Everything we are going to learn about Ultima – from its composition to its geology to how it was originally assembled. Whether it has satellites and an atmosphere and those kinds of things. Are going to teach us about the original formation conditions of objects in the solar system.”

It again adds to the amazing fact that as while life carries on as usual on Earth, we have this vessel flying around over 4 billion miles away.

What do you think? Are you impressed with the launch? In addition, what do you think NASA will achieve next? – Let us know in the comments!