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New Horizons Could Find Its Way to Proxima Centauri if it Wanted

This set of two-frame animations blinks back and forth between New Horizons and Earth images of Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri. They clearly illustrate the different view of the sky New Horizons has from its deep-space perch. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/University of Louisville/Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Mt. Lemmon Observatory

The New Horizons spacecraft is humanity's fastest-moving spacecraft and headed to interstellar space. Since its exploration of Pluto 10 years ago and subsequent flyby of Arrokoth in 2019, it's been traversing and studying the Kuiper Belt while looking for other flyby objects. That's not all it's been doing, however. New Horizons also has an extended program of making heliophysics observations. The mission science team has also planned astrophysical studies with the spacecraft's instruments. Those include measuring the intensity of the cosmic optical background and taking images of stars such as Proxima Centauri. As the spacecraft moves, the apparent positions of its stellar navigation targets have changed, but that hasn't bothered New Horizons one bit. It knows exactly where it is thanks to 3D observations of those nearby stars.



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