The date was January 19, 2006.
Cape Canaveral, Florida.
A spacecraft the size of a grand piano left
Earth
on top of a rocket traveling 36,000 miles
per hour.
This is New Horizons. It's a NASA probe and its mission is to complete humanity’s initial
tour of our solar system by flying past Pluto
and its moons.
On board are seven scientific instruments,
a generator fueled by decaying plutonium,
and a few other things...
It has a container filled with the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh.
That’s the astronomer who discovered
Pluto in 1930);
Two American flags;
Two state quarters: from Florida and Maryland;
A CD-Rom containing the names of 400,000 people
who signed up in 2005;
A CD-Rom with pictures of of the New Horizons
team;
A piece of SpaceShipOne (the first privately
owned spacecraft);
And a US stamp from1991
that says “Pluto: Not Yet Explored.”
New Horizons has been traveling through space
for over 9 years now. And its date with Pluto
has finally arrived.
To understand how big this is, you have
to get that Pluto is really far away.
Really, really far away. Billions of miles
away.
So back in grade school we modeled the solar system like this. But actually this is a huge lie.
OK so if the Earth is the size of a basketball,
Pluto would be the size of a golf ball, and on that same scale, the distance between them...
OK tell me when to stop
Keep going…. keep going...now, go outside…. and
get on a train.
That golf ball would be over 50 miles away.
Holy sh*t!!
Yeah that’s at its closest distance from us. And at the same scale, New Horizons, NASA's robot
would be a tiny fraction of
the size of a grain of sand.
And despite this immense distance, NASA’s engineers
have successfully guided New Horizons toward
its target
and they’re retrieving data back over radio waves….very slowly
The radio waves take 4.5 hours to come all the way from New Horizons to us.
NASA has to use 200-foot-wide
antennas just to even detect the signal,
and typical download speed is 1 kilobit per
second. How slow is that exactly?
So if you had an image that’s 1024 pixels
wide, it would take about 40 minutes just to download it.
That’s 50 times slower than the dialup modems
from the 90s.
And one of the key pieces of data New Horizons
will be retrieving is good photos of Pluto.
Right now we don't have any good photos of Pluto. The best things we have, from the Hubble space telescope
-- it still looks like a blurry blob. But New Horizons is going to return
historic, high-definition photos of Pluto.
It already got some great shots of Jupiter
when it flew by in 2007 to use the giant planet’s
gravity as a slingshot.
So right now New Horizons is traveling at over 31,000 miles per hour — and it's pretty much used up all its fuel
so it can't slow down as it approaches the target, so all the observations will happen quickly.
And after that?
After that, New Horizons is just going to keep going
and in 2019, engineers will fly it past another small, icy body at the edge of the solar system
to collect more data.
And as for Pluto, it will continue on around the sun,
taking 248 years to complete one revolution.
That means that the entire history of
the United States has unfolded in the time it's taken Pluto
to orbit the Sun once.
The last time Pluto was in its current position,
we didn't understand how species
evolved or how germs transmitted diseases.
Wow.
Aviation was still decades away — and spaceflight
wouldn't happen for nearly 200 years.
But this time around, when Pluto finishes an
orbit,
it's going to be met by a tiny robot sent by a
curious species of apes living on a planet billions of miles away.
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