ABOVE: The green line marks the path traveled by the New Horizons spacecraft as of
12:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time, on October 23, 2008. It is 1 billion miles from Earth.
Click here to view the official webpage showing where New Horizons is in space.
(AU stands for Astronomical Units, in case you're wondering.)
NEW HORIZONS Update... Alan Stern, the head scientist for NASA’s New Horizons mission, posted an article on the main website today talking about various mementos that were placed on the spacecraft prior to its launch in January of 2006. Stern revealed the inclusion of the nine items during a speech he gave in the Udvar-Hazy Center (where, off-topic, Tranformers: Revenge of the Fallen filmed four months ago) at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The speech was held during the induction ceremony for the full-size New Horizons model (below) that now hangs from the ceiling of the Udvar-Hazy Center.
Click on the link in the previous paragraph to see what the nine items are. Of those nine, there is one memento that sticks out for me: The compact disc bearing the names of 434,738 people who submitted their monikers through the Internet between February and September of 2006. Even though my name is now safely on Mars onboard the Phoenix lander, orbiting our Moon onboard Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter, and heading towards the Asteroid Belt on the Dawn spacecraft (and will hopefully soar into space onboard three more spacecraft that are scheduled to launch in 2009. I’ll mention them around the time they launch, haha), it’s New Horizons that I wish I had my name on. Not that I don’t care about having my name on the probes listed above... I’m really grateful that those space missions provided the opportunity to have the public make its mark on them.
If you go to this journal entry, you’ll see how shocked I was when I found out that I could’ve sent my name to Pluto, and beyond. There was one online article that mentioned how people who submitted their names for New Horizons were pretty much securing some kind of "eternal legacy" for themselves and people they knew whose names they also provided...since New Horizons will eventually leave our solar system—and like Voyagers’ 1 and 2—head for the stars.
Mr. Stern himself mentioned in the article linked in the first paragraph that New Horizons will "fly among the stars and literally outlive the Earth itself." ARG. There was suppose to be a twin mission for New Horizons, known as New Horizons 2 (hope you didn’t try to guess the name too hard), which would’ve did a flyby of Uranus before venturing out into deep space. Unfortunately, this flight never got past the planning stage due to various reasons (one is listed here). It’s gonna be a while till NASA does another outer planet mission where the spacecraft departs our solar system. And when NASA does, I’ll be sitting at my computer...waiting to type my name and submit it to be sent off into the cosmos.
That was corny, I know.
NEW HORIZONS Blog Entries Archive:
September 26, 2005
December 19, 2005
January 7, 2006
January 17, 2006
January 19, 2006
April 12, 2006
June 15, 2006
February 27, 2007
October 22, 2007
June 8, 2008
October 23, 2008
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