Caption

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.