We Did a Pluto Fly-By Today
You may have heard that we’ve launched a spacecraft that passed by Pluto this morning. The goal of the mission is to collect scientific data and to send it home to Earth. In case you haven’t been paying much attention to the details, this is really one heck of a feat and we should be proud that we’ve pulled it off.
First, the aptly named “New Horizons” will be traveling approximately 3,000,000,000 miles. That’s three BILLION. So, we just took an object the size of a piano and launched it 3,000,000,000 miles into the exact tiny window of space that we calculated. Amazing. One scientist compared this to an East Coast to West Coast hole-in-one on an imaginary golf course. Just to put this distance into perspective, our moon is about 238,900 miles away from Earth. So the New Horizons’ journey is like going on a round-trip to the moon 6,300 times. Another way to think about this incredible distance is that it’s going to take the information transmitted from New Horizons about 4.5 hours to travel back to us on Earth – while going the speed of light! Again using the moon as a comparison, it takes light from the moon 1.3 seconds to reach Earth. It will take the information from New Horizons about 16,200 seconds to get to Earth.
Next, this thing is moving FAST. Estimates are about 31,000 miles an hour. The fasted jet speed ever recorded is 3,529 miles per hour. So New Horizons is going almost 9 times as fast as that jet. If LA and NYC are approximately 2800 miles apart, this spacecraft could do that trip just over 11 times in ONE HOUR. That is some serious speed. Even with New Horizons travelling at that speed, it took about nine and a half years to for it to reach its goal near Pluto. Stop and think for a minute about what you were doing in January, 2006 –- that’s when New Horizons’ launch took place. How much has happened in your life since then? How different are you? How different is our technology? That whole time, New Horizons has been on its mission speeding toward Pluto.
But beyond the amazing accomplishments we have made with technology and science in this endeavor, what could this new data show us? Some scientists believe that the data may show there is liquid water under a frozen surface. This would make Pluto a target in the search for extraterrestrial life. Perhaps not walking, talking E.T’s from the movies, but perhaps simple organisms that would be similar to those here on Earth that were the genesis for the more complex organisms that we have today. This could be a great leap toward finding definitive proof that life, in some form, exists on planets besides our own.
All in all, this is a very cool mission. We should be proud of its success and hope that it might lead to some exciting and amazing new discoveries about our solar system and universe.
