Zooming through the outer reaches of the solar system, A #NASA spacecraft just clocked a distance 60 times farther from the sun than Earth.
The extraordinary benchmark announced this week means the #NewHorizons probe has doubled its 2015 distance, when it was snapping pictures of Pluto and its moons.
Perhaps more surprising than this intangible deep-space milestone is the one this intrepid spacecraft hasn't reached yet: the outer edge of the solar system's Kuiper Belt.
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Scientists had expected the spacecraft to arrive at the proverbial edge about 1 billion miles ago.
While the spacecraft has whizzed away at 300 million miles per year, the New Horizons team has continued to collect data about the Kuiper Belt. What's more, using the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, New Horizon's scientists detected a population of previously unknown cosmic objects. The group could be sprawled out to almost 90 times as far as Earth is from the sun.
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The discovery suggests the Kuiper Belt may span much farther than once thought, or that there is perhaps another such belt even farther away than the one scientists have known about since the 1990s.
The new finding could mean the spacecraft has a longer journey ahead — on the scale of billions of more miles — before it gets to interstellar space, the place outside the region affected by the sun’s constant flow of material.