New Horizons Probe Update

It’s been almost a year since I last wrote an update on the New Horizons Probe. Most likely most of you don’t know what it even is, let alone why I would be writing an update on it. So here’s a little background: On January 19, 2006 NASA launched the New Horizons Probe towards Pluto. This probe is, to date, the fastest vehicle mankind has ever launched, crossing the moon’s orbit in just 8 hour and 35 minutes. By contrast, in the late 60’s to early 70’s we were sending men to the moon. Their mission had them coasting through cislunar space (the open space between the earth and the moon) for nearly 3 days. New Horizon’s mission is the first ever to the ex-planet (now dwarf planet, but you would be hard pressed to find a scientist who really cares what its classification is) of Pluto.

 

I love to use the numbers in this mission to explain just how big space really is. Here we have mankind’s fastest vehicle (moving, at times, upwards of 51,000 mph. Yea, 51 thousand miles an hour….that’s around mach 68) yet it’s going to take 15 years to reach Pluto. My friends, that’s a long time.

 

Anyway, since the launch (which I was lucky to see live on NASA TV) I’ve tracked this little machine while it coasts and sleeps.

 

• NH is currently cruising along at 39,572 mph, that’s nearly 11 miles every second! Think about your drive to work every day. For me, I live almost exactly 14 miles from my office and it takes me, on average, 30 minutes to get there. If I could hitch a ride on NH, I could leave my house at 8:59:58 and not be late for work.
• NH is currently 11.92 AU (that’s Astronomical Units. This is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun, or 93 million miles) from Earth. 11.92 AU is 1.1 billion miles. At that distance, it takes a signal from Earth, traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) over 1.6 hours just to reach the probe. Then it takes another 1.6 hours for NH to respond. That means that every time one of the mission controllers needs to ask the probe a question, she better plan ahead, because it’s going to be over 3 hours before she gets a response (and hey, in that 3 hour window, NH has traveled an additional 118,716 miles away!)
• If NH had traveled the same distance as noted above, but in Earth Orbit (a circumference of roughly 26,000 miles) it would have circled us 42,616 times. Since each orbit takes about 90 minutes at a speed of 17,500 mph (much faster and you’re not going to be in Earth’s orbit. You’ll zip off into space instead, much like NH itself!), it would have been orbiting the Earth for 3,835,400 minutes (that breaks down into 63,924 hours, or 2,663 days, or 7.2 years). Instead it’s gone the same distance in under 3 years!
• NH is currently 20.21AU (1,878,640,000 miles) from Pluto. Even if it could accelerate to the speed of light, it would still take nearly 3 hours to get to the planet.

 

NH is set to do a flyby of Pluto in July of 2015. It’s not, however, going to stop…not even for a little while. Its mission is to continue out into the Kuiper Belt and beyond, pretty much forever. NH will still be coasting through space millions, if not billions of years from now (as long as it doesn’t get creamed by some wandering neutron star, ha!), how’s that for a legacy? J

Chapter 1

I once tried to write a book. I had what, in my head, was a great idea. I knew it would be a bestseller if I could just get it on paper. So I sat down, opened the computer, loaded Word, typed “Chapter 1″, hit enter a couple times, and clicked “tab” to indent for the paragraph. Up to this point things were going great. The book was coming along exactly as planned.

“OK,” I thought to myself, “what’s the opening scene? How do I hook my audience from sentence number one?” This, of course, turned out to be the first major roadblock on my way to the publishing house, but I muscled through and finally typed out the first sentence of my Hugo Award winning novel. Feeling quite accomplished I sat back and read what I written. This brought me to the book’s first major editing spree. In fact, I had to rewrite the entire chapter at this point. Again, I muscled through, nose to the grindstone (among other cliche’s that we accomplished author’s tend to avoid) and after a few more drastic edits, I had the scene set. I was on a roll, the words practically typing themselves:

“It was another hot day of work in the desert, with temperatures soaring near 120 degrees. A stiff breeze out of the west did nothing to alleviate the heat; instead it filled the air with fine grains of sand which stuck to the sweat covered bodies of the archaeologists and their crew. Declan stood up, removing the bandanna from his wind-burned face and using it to wipe his brow.”

“Well, now!” I said, that’s one fine piece of writing! I was dazzled by thoughts of being the world’s newest Arthur C. Clark. I was already going over the movie rights with my agent. For the next few weeks I worked. I was a mad typist (and delete-ist), page after page (of the same page) flew from my mind onto the screen (and back off).  Finally, exhausted and satiated, I viewed my masterpiece in its entirety. I had written 358 words, including the words “chapter” and “1″. Well that’s not entirely true. I had written 16,789 words. But only 358 stuck.

To end what I’m sure is a burning curiosity here are the other 287 words I haven’t already revealed:

Man is it ever a scorcher today,” he exclaimed to his still-kneeling colleague, “What do you suppose it is, 118? 119?”

“All you do is complain about the heat, Declan. It makes me wonder why you chose a profession whose sole purpose is to dig holes in the middle of a desert!’ Branson replied, laughing. “Besides it’s not that bad. We have water, we have shade. And the new fans your company sent for use in the tents work pretty well, all things considered.”

“Yea, well it’s still hot,” he said, smiling. Standing atop a small outcrop of rock, Declan shielded his eyes from the glaring sun and peered out over the dust covered landscape trying to imagine what it must have looked like in ancient times when the whole area was lush, green, and covered with vegetation. A cry from one of the crew brought his attention back to the present.

“We better go see what that’s all about,” he told Branson, jogging off towards the source of the excitement.

The crew’s forman met him halfway there.

“What is it, what did you guys find?”

“I’m not really sure, boss. I haven’t seen anything like it before.”

“Well that’s promising,” Declan said hopefully. “What’s it looke like?”

“It’s only a small shard, but the surface is, well it’s hard to describe. It’s silvery, but extrememly smooth, not like any kind of jewelry we’ve seen. It’s almost mirror-like. It’s got a curved edge and looks like it’s just a piece, broken off of a larger, I dunno, like a disc or something.”

“Is it a colored lens?  We’ve found plenty of sunglasses before.”

“No, sir. It’s perfectly flat.”

“Hmm. that does sound strange. Let’s take a look.”

 

It was around the time that I placed that last quotation mark that I began to realize that I had no interest in where the story was going, how I was going to get there, or what would become of the characters. Intrigued with this newest development I clicked “save” and put the file in a safe place while I contemplated my future as a rich novelist. “Bah!” I said, “Writing isn’t for me. It’s too structured and rule-ridden. I need something that will let me express myself freely, without being bound by society’s chains, chains I say!”

Chapter 2

I once tried to write a song…