Wednesday, October 15, 2008
1000 Days From Earth
The New Horizons space probe was launched on January 19, 2006 bound for Pluto, traveling faster than any space craft in history. It passed the orbit of the moon in barely 8 hours (it took Apollo astronauts 3 days to cover that same distance). Today is the 1000th day since that launch. It is only 1/3 of the way there, at about 32 Astronomical Units out, putting it past the orbit of Saturn. An Astronomical Unit is the distance from the Sun to the Earth: 93 million miles. New Horizons will not reach Pluto until July 14, 2015.
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3 comments:
Long trip! Past the moon in 8 hours -- must have used a huge rocket (Saturn 5 but smaller payload?).
It was launched by an Atlas V-551. The Atlas V is built by the Lockheed Martin-Boeing joint venture United Launch Alliance. Aerojet develops and manufactures the Atlas V boosters. The rocket, built in Decatur, Alabama, consists of a first stage powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen, which uses a Russian-made RD-180 engine (consider the irony: the original Atlas 1 was an ICBM designed to target Russian cities; the RD-180 was originally built by the Russians to power their ICBMs designed to target American cities), and a liquid hydrogen–liquid oxygen powered Centaur second stage. The configuration that took New Horizons into space also used strap-on booster rockets and a Boeing Star 48B third stage. It was the first Atlas V launch with a third stage.
The New Horizons space probe is comparable in size and general shape to a grand piano and has been compared to a "piano glued to a sports-car-sized satellite dish."
It masses about 1050 pounds.
Glad you defined AU; for a second there I thought it was only 32 dog-lengths out.
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