By Kurtis Archer | 2025-08-18

NASA's long-flying New Horizons spacecraft was used to conduct the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation.

A paper on the results is set to be published in The Astronomical Journal, Phys.org reported on July 4.

As a proof-of-concept, a research team used the probe's unique vantage on its trek toward interstellar space to photograph two of our closest stellar neighbors -- Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light-years away, and Wolf 359, 7.86 light-years distant, according to the report.

From New Horizons' viewpoint, the stars' apparent positions shifted relative to how they look from Earth, an effect called stellar parallax.

By combining those measurements with a three-dimensional map of the local stellar neighborhood, the researchers pinpointed the spacecraft's location to within about 6.5 million km (4.1 million miles) -- comparable to knowing the New York–to-Los Angeles distance to an accuracy of merely 66 cm (26 inches).

Directly observing large stellar parallaxes from widely separated simultaneous observers is highly educational, according to the researchers.

New Horizons is a deep-space probe launched in January 2006 that successfully completed its primary and secondary missions -- flybys of the Pluto system and a Kuiper belt object, respectively.

The spacecraft holds the distinction of being the fastest man-made object that has ever been launched from Earth.

A wealth of data

New Horizons has already provided valuable insights into Pluto and its five moons, the distant Arrokoth and other objects in the Kuiper belt -- the region of space beyond Neptune.

The space probe in June 2006 imaged 132524 APL, a small asteroid, before reaching the Jupiter system in February 2007.

It then conducted a gravity-assisted launch around the gas giant, changing its trajectory toward the Pluto system with a sling-shot effect that increased the speed of the craft and shortened the trip by at least three years.

Once it reached Pluto in July 2015, New Horizons gathered data on Pluto's interior and its surface, discovering that Pluto has been geologically active throughout its history in a variety of ways.

The probe allowed scientists to realize the complexity of Pluto and its moons, and it is now assumed that Pluto and Charon formed after a large impact event, not unlike the formation of Earth and its moon.

"I thought the Solar System had saved the best for last. Pluto just delivered and delivered and delivered these major headlines," Alan Stern, Principal Investigator for New Horizons, told Space.com in February.

After the flyby of the Pluto system, New Horizons visited 2014 MU69, known as Arrokoth, in 2019.

A trans-Neptunian object located in the Kuiper belt, Arrokoth resembles a flattened snowman in shape and orbits approximately a billion miles past Pluto, or about four billion miles past Earth.

The visual data from New Horizons revealed Arrokoth to be a contact binary -- two Kuiper belt objects that had merged via gravity.

Stereo imaging of Arrokoth's two lobes provided information that led to a terrain model, rotation modeling, global shape modeling, gravity modeling, geological interpretations and more.

"We’ve never seen anything like this anywhere in the solar system," Stern said of Arrokoth. "It is sending the planetary science community back to the drawing board to understand how planetesimals -- the building blocks of the planets -- form."

Edge of the solar system

New Horizons continues to fly far beyond Arrokoth through the Kuiper belt into space.

NASA scientists believe the probe confirmed a "hydrogen wall" at the edge of the solar system, supporting results from 1992 by the two Voyager spacecrafts.

The probe, which is about the size of a grand piano and twice as far away as Pluto, is gathering heliophysics data as of 2025.

It is currently traveling at 300 million miles per year and may perform a flyby of another distant object someday.

The spacecraft is expected to exit the Kuiper Belt between 2028 and 2029.

"We're the only spacecraft out there. There's nothing else planned to come this way," according to Stern.