New Horizons

On January 19 NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft on a 9 year journey to Pluto. Why would I write about that now? Well, on April 6 New Horizons will cross the orbit of Mars having left Earth only 78 days before. In other words, this spacecraft is moving fast. At launch, NH was whipped up to a speed of ~25,000 mph. At that speed, the spacecraft reached the orbit of the moon in just under 9 hours. To put that in perspective, the Apollo missions to the moon required 3 days to cross the distance between the Earth and moon. A typical spacecraft mission to Mars requires about 6 months cruise time. So, reaching the orbit of Mars in 78 days is quite an accomplishment. NH will reach Jupiter in February 2007 and use a gravity assist to boost speed even further for the remainder of the cruise to Pluto and beyond.

New Horizons is exciting to me because it is our first reconnaissance of Pluto, we really have no idea what it looks like. That kind of visual mystery fascinates me and takes me back to the summer of 1989 when I saw the first images of Neptune returned from Voyager 2. In that case we basically knew what Neptune looked like, but the details were the best part. Neptune had enormous storms and varieties of colors, and we were expecting it to be dormant for the most part. I imagine Pluto will offer plenty of surprises as well. New Horizons executes the Pluto flyby in July 2015. I will have just turned 40 and will hopefully have a few kids to share the excitement with.