New Horizons, 2020
An illustration about the 5 space probes presently on journeys that will take them outside of our solar system, Voyagers 1 & 2 (right of image), Pioneers 10 (top right) & 11 (front left) & New Horizons (middle left).
Voyager 1 moved beyond the solar system in 2012, leaving the 'bubble' called the heliosphere in which our sun's solar winds act, with Voyager 2 following in 2019 and sending data about previously unknown boundary layers between the heliosphere and interstellar space known as the heliopause. The diagrams in the background were sent on the Voyager crafts for any intelligent life they might encounter as they continue drifting through space once they lose power, as messages and instructions about how to find us, and how to listen to the "Sounds of the Earth" gold record they carry using the included stylus & cartridge. The record features greetings, sounds and music that reflected human diversity.
Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, and Pioneer 11 in 1973, also carry diagrams with them on golden plaques, including a depiction of a man and a woman, and all four craft have the same pulsar 'map' designed to show Earths location in relation to the energy beam pulse signals that point towards Earth from 14 neutron stars intermittently when rotating. At the time this was thought the most stable way to map out our location, through their pulse frequency approximate positions from the Sun, however since their launches it's been discovered that there are a billion pulsars in the Milky Way, and that which will point towards Earth will change unpredictably over time.
New Horizons, launched in 2006, studied Pluto and its moons for the first time (when it left Earth, Pluto was still a planet but by the time it arrived in 2015 the celestial body had been demoted to a dwarf planet) and in 2019 flew past 2014 MU69 in the Kuiper belt, the most distant object ever explored.
