After Visiting Pluto, NASA ’s New Horizons Spacecraft Reaches Another Cosmic Milestone

On Jan. 19, 2006, the Earth lost half a ton. More precisely, it lost 1,054 lbs (478 kg), but it’s O.K. to round down, since the 13 octillion-pound planet hardly noticed the missing weight. The flyweight fleck of matter was very much born of the planet, a collection of metal and silicon and copper and rubber and plastics and foil and a bit of plutonium hammered together into the New Horizons spacecraft. Launched atop an Atlas V rocket, New Horizons tore away from Earth at a blistering 58,500 k/h (36,400 mph), a record-breaking speed that seemed very much fitting, given that its destination was Pluto, 5.1 billion km (3.2 billion mi.) away. If you want to travel a distance like that, it’s best to make tracks. New Horizons reached Pluto on July 14, 2015, becoming the first spacecraft to barnstorm the dwarf planet. Less than four years later, on Jan. 1, 2019, it passed the peanut-shaped, 36-km long Kuiper Belt object known as Arrokoth, a rocky, icy body in the river of similar comet-like objects that circles the solar system. That rendezvous too was a first. We’ve known about the Kuiper Belt since astronomer Gerard Kuiper theorized its existence in 1951, but we had never visited. One little ship notching two space records ought to be accomplishment enough. But New Horizons is about to make headlines again. At precisely 8:42 a.m. EDT tomorrow, it will pass an invisible line in space that will place it 7.5 billion kilometers from Earth. That factors out to 50 astr...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news