This is the most outrageous photo taken in the world.

The imager of New Horizon spacecraft (called the long-range reconnaissance imager) took false color images of these objects in the Kuiper Belt in February at 20 17, 20 12, HZ84 (left) and 20 12, HE85. At present, these are the farthest images from the earth taken by spacecraft. The photos of NASA /JHUAPL/SwRI look different: fuzzy green spots and pixelated blue. But it can be said that they are one of the most amazing photos ever.

This is because they were shot from the farthest place on the earth, and the farthest place on the earth was shot by spacecraft at a distance of 3.79 billion miles (66.5438+0.2 billion kilometers). This spacecraft is NASA's "New Horizon" interstellar spacecraft, which flew over Pluto in 20 15. It is planned to fly next to a celestial body in the Kuiper Belt outside the solar system in 20 19 and 1 year.

On February 5, 20 17, New Horizons took two photos of the farthest Kuiper Belt object (KBOs), 20 12 HZ84 and 20 12 HE85. Just two hours ago, the spacecraft officially won the title of "the most space photographer" by taking a camera calibration photo of a distant star cluster called the wishing pool. This is a short record, because two KBOs were shot two hours later. [Earth from top to bottom: 10 1 amazing pictures from orbit]

Before shooting the New Horizon Star, the farthest picture from the earth was one of the blue marbles shot by Voyager 1 on February 4th, 990. This image, called "light blue dot", was taken 3.75 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away.

A few hours later, this new vision image of the so-called wishing pool cluster, which was taken on February 5, 2007, was the farthest image taken by the spacecraft. (NASA /JHUAPL/SwRI) New Horizons is heading for a KBO named 20 14 MU69, which is one of more than 20 distant rocks and ice that NASA hopes to observe during the spacecraft mission. The Kuiper Belt is a huge disk belt, which is located in the orbit of Neptune about 2.7 billion to 9.3 billion miles (4.4 billion to 65.438+0.49 billion kilometers) from the sun, and contains thousands of ice objects, comets and dwarf planets. (Pluto is one of these dwarf planets) MU69 in 20 14 years is close to Pluto 10 billion miles, and Pluto itself is 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away from the Earth. In order to get there, New Horizon is being transported by truck: it travels over 700,000 miles (165438+ million kilometers) every day.

So how does "new vision" send images, even blurred images, back to the whole space? According to Johns Hopkins University, where the scientists in charge of spacecraft data communication are located, it is not easy. Data are stored in the new vision of solid-state recorders (the only moving part of these flash memory devices is electronic devices) and then transmitted by radio waves. Needless to say, the signal strength is very low-the transmitting power of the antenna is 12 watt, and the receiving power of the signal is 65438+ 1 billionth watt-so the data transmission speed is very slow. The transmission rate of New Horizon signal is only 2 kilobits per second. Alan Stern, the main researcher of the New Horizon mission, told Life Science magazine that even the old dial-up network can transmit data at a speed of 56 kilobits per second.

It takes about 4 hours for each image to be transmitted and 6 hours for data to be transmitted to the earth. Nasa's deep space network antenna dish captures weak signals from new horizons and reassembles the original data into a usable form. At present, New Horizon will not send any snapshots to China. According to NASA, the spacecraft has been hibernating until June 4, when the mission controller will take it back to the Internet and start preparing for the visit of MU69.

Originally published in Life Science.