New Horizons Parallax Program Options

[dtolman]

New Horizons is going to be launching a Parallax Program this year - with planned simultaneous observations from Earth and New Horizons of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 on April 22nd and April 23rd.

At New Horizons distance the change in position for those two will be very noticeable - over an arcsecond - and the combined 3-d image should have some noticeable "pop" for those two stars versus other background ones.

As always this decade, the latest photo ever taken by New Horizons will be the Farthest Ever Taken.

[tanjent]

The term “parallax second of arc” refers to the observable angular shift in the position of a object seen from opposite sides of the earth’s orbit around the sun, an offset distance of some 2 AU at the base of the triangle. This is much less than the distance to New Horizons at the present time. So can we conclude that the reason why this shift was not observed from Cassini or Juno or other distant spacecraft is simply because they did not look for it? But for navigational observations, surely they would have to take it into account...

Longer baseline, probably coupled with a higher resolution camera, will allow more precise distance measurements than previously possible. But what Is scientifically new here?