{"id":217184,"date":"2025-07-04T09:02:56","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T14:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/new-horizons-conducts-first-ever-successful-deep-space-stellar-navigation-test"},"modified":"2025-07-04T09:02:56","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T14:02:56","slug":"new-horizons-conducts-first-ever-successful-deep-space-stellar-navigation-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/new-horizons-conducts-first-ever-successful-deep-space-stellar-navigation-test","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons conducts first-ever successful deep space stellar navigation test"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-horizons-conducts-first-ever-successful-deep-space-stellar-navigation-test2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As NASA\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/mission\/new-horizons\/\" target=\"_blank\">New Horizons<\/a> spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of 438 million miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation.<\/p>\n<p>A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in <i>The Astronomical Journal<\/i>. The pre-print is available on the server <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2506.21666\" target=\"_blank\"><i>arXiv<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As a proof-of-concept test, the researchers took advantage of the spacecraft\u2019s unique vantage point as it traveled toward <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/interstellar+space\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">interstellar space<\/a> to image two of our nearest stellar neighbors, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from Earth, and Wolf 359, which is 7.86 light-years away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of 438 million miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation. A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}