New Horizons hits halfway mark between Saturn, Uranus orbits

The NASA spacecraft will reach 14.41 astronomical units from the Sun - 1.34 billion miles, or nearly 14,5 times the distance between the Earth and Sun - between 22:00-23:00 UTC.

"Only five operating spacecraft have ever journeyed this far, and only one - the storied Voyager 2 mission - still had an encounter planned even farther out," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. "New Horizons is on its way to the farthest planetary encounter ever, at just over 32 astronomical units, which is a quarter-billion miles beyond the current planetary encounter record set at Neptune back in 1989."

Not that the spacecraft "sensed" today's moment; New Horizons entered hibernation on Aug. 27 after its annual checkout and won't be stirred again by the mission operations team until Nov. 9. New Horizons, launched more than 3,5 years ago on Jan. 19, 2006, is approximately 1.3 billion miles (2.1 billion kilometers) from Earth, speeding away from the Sun at just over 37,000 miles per hour. The spacecraft will actually cross the orbit of Uranus on March 18, 2011.

New Horizons continues to cross the orbits of the outer planets, though it will not come close to Uranus (or Neptune, beyond) on the way to Pluto. Green denotes space New Horizons has covered; red marks its projected path toward the Pluto system. Credit: JHU/APL

Source: The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
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