NASA’s New Horizons probe just nailed another ‘first’

[Mike Wehner]

• NASA's New Horizons probe was able to help measure the distance between two stars and our home system thanks to its distant location.
• The probe's images of the stars were compared with images of those same stars shot from Earth, and researchers calculated the distances.
• One of the stars, Proxima Centauri, hosts planets that have long been of interest to astronomers as a potential future home for human colonists.

NASA has a lot of high-powered space-gazing hardware at its disposal. From ground-based telescopes to the orbiting eyes of Hubble, the space agency can direct its attention at just about whatever feature of the night sky it desires. The New Horizons probe, however, is offering NASA new opportunities for unique observations of the cosmos, and it's capable of such feats because it's nowhere near Earth at all.

As Nature explains in a lengthy new article, the New Horizons probe has managed to measure the distance between two distant stars thanks to its current position near the outer reaches of our solar system.

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NASA’s New Horizons probe just nailed another ‘first’ originally appeared on BGR.com on Sat, 13 Jun 2020 at 10:33:46 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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