The telescope was launched almost four years ago and sent to an observing position 1.5 million km from Earth.
The 250 million km between Mars and Earth right now means there is a 13-minute lag in communications.
It now sits over a million km from Earth, taking astonishing vistas of the cold and dusty cosmos.
BBC: Uranus image celebrates Herschel - the man and the machine
The asteroid is more than 94 million miles (152 million km) from Earth.
Never mind wars, politics and the economy - everyone, it seemed, wanted to find out more about this unusual, 25cm-high rock sitting in a crater almost 300 million km from Earth.
It will make its closest approach to the Sun - at a distance of not much more than a million km from the Sun's surface - on 28 November.
This final flight is the vessel's 25th overall, having already clocked a cumulative distance in space of 166 million km - an expanse just greater than that which divides the Earth and the Sun.
The researchers used data from the global network of solar monitoring telescopes (Gong) as well as the Soho satellite positioned in a stable orbit 1.6 million km (a million miles) closer to the Sun than the Earth.
That compared with the 2007 minimum of 4.1 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles).
Camels roam freely across an area of 3.3 million sq km (1.3 million sq miles) encompassing the states of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland, as well as the Northern Territory.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Arctic sea-ice covered 4.5 million sq km (1.7 million sq miles) at its lowest point on 12 September last year.
The analysis produced a summer Arctic sea-ice minimum extent of 6.9 million sq km.
BBC: Earliest satellite maps of Antarctic and Arctic sea-ice
This is broadly similar to the 1979-2000 average of 7.04 million sq km observed by modern satellites, and the number used to judge current behaviour in the Arctic.
BBC: Earliest satellite maps of Antarctic and Arctic sea-ice
That sees a ban on shark fishing and possession or sale of shark products in an area now totalling 6.7 million sq km - nearly the size of Australia.
Recent years have witnessed a dramatic decline in both volume and extent, with the 2012 coverage - like the Southern Hemisphere - setting a "record" for the modern era at 3.41 million sq km.
BBC: Earliest satellite maps of Antarctic and Arctic sea-ice
The floating sea-ice, which would normally keep the shelves hemmed in, has shrunk to just under five million sq km, the second lowest extent recorded since the era of satellite measurement began about 30 years ago.
The South Pacific island chain declared a 1.9 million-sq-km sanctuary, contiguous with one established last week by neighbouring French Polynesia.
About 50 million people in a 800-mile (1, 300-km) swathe of the US are threatened by heavy rain, wind and snow.
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