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