New horizon spacecraft where is it now

You can wind the animation backwards and then forwards in time to watch its launch January , its flyby of Jupiter February , its encounter with Pluto June , its encounter with Ultima Thule January and beyond.

You can stop it at any time to see its position and the position of the planets during its flight. If you've selected the mobile version recommended for smaller screens then we provide a video which also allows you to see an animation of the New Horizons journey from Earth to Pluto to Ultima Thule and on. Even while scientists still await a vast amount of data from New Horizons expected to continue downloading well into NASA have published their first report on discoveries so far. Among some of the findings are that Ultima Thule is the reddest outer solar system object ever visited, and that the two lobes came together very gently and were tidally locked together e.

Ultima Thule le has a flatter shape. By studying images of Ultima Thule in silhouette as New Horizons left the vicinity, scientists have discovered that instead of Ultima Thule being comprised of two roughly spherical objects, it is more like a dented walnut shaped object stuck to a pancake shaped object.

Nothing this shape has ever been seen before orbiting the Sun and so scientists have to try and work out the processes involved in creating these shapes. This image captured when Ultima Thule was 4, miles 6, kilometers from the spacecraft, at UT a.

EST on Jan. With an original resolution of feet meters per pixel, the image was stored in the spacecraft's data memory and transmitted to Earth on Jan.

Scientists then sharpened the image to enhance fine detail. The following update from the New Horizon's team provides little new information other than a 3D but still low res representation of Ultima Thule. Combination of images from 2 sensors indicate that Ultima Thule is red in colour - possibly due to irradiated ice.

It was taken at Universal Time on January 1, , just 30 minutes before closest approach from a range of 18, miles 28, kilometers , with an original scale of feet meters per pixel. Ultima Thule is composed of two roughly spherical shaped objects now called Ultima and Thule which have joined together - apparently very slowly. This is what is called a "contact binary" and leads to an expectation that contact binaries are perhaps highly likely from the formation processes present in the Kuiper belt.

Images so far are illuminated by the Sun which is behind New Horizons. Later images taken as New Horizons travels past Ultima will be illuminated from the side and will have more shadowing to allow the objects shape to be resolved. The rotation rate has been narrowed down to about once every 15 hours,.

New Horizons has sent back a status report indicating that it was successful in capturing data from it's rendezvous with Ultima Thule.

It will continue to do some science before sending more data back to earth. Because of the distance it will take a long time to return all the data - some 20 months in total - but we're hoping for some reasonably detailed images to be returned in the next couple of days.

New Horizons will be behind the Sun from Earth's perspective for a week or so starting this weekend which will mean no data is returned during that period, but each day there after more and more data will be returned. NASA Article. The New Horizons team know that Ultima Thule is spinning on an axis which points towards towards the spacecraft - like looking at a propeller from the front, and seems to be spinning possibly once every 15 hours - or perhaps every 30 hours.

Its dimensions are about 35km by 15km. For other NASA coverage information, click here. New horizons is healthy and looking good to rendezvous with Ultima Thule on Jan 1st No rings or moons have been detected so it has manoeuvred itself so that it passes on the planned closest path to the object. The rendezvous with Ultima Thule is going to be a lot quicker than the Pluto Rendezvous. It's not because New Horizon's is travelling faster - indeed it's speed will be pretty much the same, but because Ultima Thule is a lot smaller than Pluto.

With Pluto at around km diameter , New Horizons could begin observing the dwarf planet when it was weeks away. But because Ultima Thule is only about 30km diameter, New Horizons will only be able to start resolving details about a day before the encounter. Hitting even a small speck of dust at 10 miles a second could easily destroy the probe.

The later any hazard is detected, the more difficult it will be to avoid it. This is the furthest rendezvous. There are no other missions currently planned to visit the outer solar system.

This is the first time we will have visited an object that has been in the "deep freeze" of space since it was formed. The New Horizons spacecraft is now more than 4. NASA reports that the probe is healthy and all systems are operating normally. Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money and planet! By signing up through this link , Futurism.

The third question when will New Horizons leave our solar system? Share This Article. More on Off World. At the time of the Pluto flyby, two-way communication between New Horizons and Earth required a nine-hour round trip — 4.

And at its current distance, signals take 7 hours to reach the far flung spacecraft, and another 7 hours before its control team on Earth finds out if the message was received. When you send a real-time command from Earth, you have to know where the spacecraft will be in the future.

As New Horizons crossed the solar system, and its distance from Earth jumped from millions to billions of miles, that time between contacts grew from a few minutes to several hours.

And on April 17 at UTC a. EDT , New Horizons will reach a rare deep-space milepost — 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is.

New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to reach this great distance, following the legendary Voyagers 1 and 2 and their predecessors, Pioneers 10 and New Horizons is almost 5 billion miles 7. This went from almost instantaneous to now being on the order of 14 hours.