Scientists have just received a transmission containing the most distant photos ever taken from Planet Earth.
Take a good, hard look at the photos you see above, because there is something truly astonishing about those pictures. They are nothing more than bluish green blurs, but they have shattered the record for the farthest we have ever taken a picture from our home planet in the entire history of space exploration.
The photos were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on Thursday, which is hosted by the New Horizons spacecraft famous for taking those jaw-dropping photos of Pluto back in 2015. Since then, New Horizons has been speeding beyond our solar system and toward the distant Kuiper Belt, where it has centered on three objects: a star group called the Wishing Well and two objects in the Kuiper Belt, which you see above.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft broke Voyager 1’s record of 3.75 billion miles from Earth all the way back in 1990 when it snapped the photo this past week. That picture was the famous Pale Blue Dot photo, when Voyager turned around and captured a photo of Earth at such an incredible distance that it caused famous astronomer Carl Sagan to marvel at our place in the universe.
“NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recently turned its telescopic camera toward a field of stars, snapped an image – and made history,” reads the statement from NASA. “The routine calibration frame of the “Wishing Well” galactic open star cluster, made by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Dec. 5, was taken when New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers, or 40.9 astronomical units) from Earth – making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth.”
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