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New Horizons images enable first test of interstellar navigation
By looking at the shifting of stars in photos from the New Horizons probe, astronomers have calculated its position in the galaxy – a technique that could be useful for interstellar missions
New Horizons was launched in 2006, initially to study Pluto, but it has since travelled way beyond this point, ploughing on through the Kuiper belt, a vast, wide band of rocks and dust billions of miles from the sun. They did it by comparing the probe’s photos of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 with measurements from the Gaia space telescope, which has produced the most detailed map of stars in our Milky Way. Using this technique for interstellar navigation could offer advantages over the DSN because it could give more accurate location readings as a spacecraft gets further away from Earth, as well as being able to operate autonomously without needing to wait for a radio signal to come from our solar system, says Massimiliano Vasile at the University of Strathclyde, UK.
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