Credit: NASA, APL, SwRI, Serge Brunier (ESO), Marc Postman (STScI), Dan Durda
An artist's impression of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft against the backdrop of deep space. More than 5.4 billion miles (7.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, New Horizons is traversing a region of the solar system far enough from the Sun to offer the darkest skies available to any existing telescope – and to provide a unique vantage point from which to measure the overall brightness of the distant universe. The lane of our Milky Way galaxy is in the background.