NASA's incredible mission to Pluto, explained

3, 2, 1. The date was January 19, 2006. Cape Canaveral, Florida. A spacecraft the size of a grand piano left Earth on top of a rocket traveling 36,000 miles per hour. This is New Horizons. It's a NASA probe and its mission is to complete humanity’s initial tour of our solar system by flying past Pluto and its moons. On board are seven scientific instruments, a generator fueled by decaying plutonium, and a few other things... It has a container filled with the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh. That’s the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930); Two American flags; Two state quarters: from Florida and Maryland; A CD-Rom containing the names of 400,000 people who signed up in 2005; A CD-Rom with pictures of of the New Horizons team; A piece of SpaceShipOne (the first privately owned spacecraft); And a US stamp from1991   that says “Pluto: Not Yet Explored.” New Horizons has been traveling through space for over 9 years now. And its date with Pluto has finally arrived. To understand how big this is, you have to get that Pluto is really far away. Really, really far away. Billions of miles away. So back in grade school we modeled the solar system like this. But actually this is a huge lie. OK so if the Earth is the size of a basketball, Pluto would be the size of a golf ball, and on that same scale, the distance between them... OK tell me when to stop Keep going…. keep going...now, go outside…. and get on a train. That golf ball would be over 50 miles away. Holy sh*t!! Yeah that’s at its closest distance from us. And at the same scale, New Horizons, NASA's robot would be a tiny fraction of the size of a grain of sand. And despite this immense distance, NASA’s engineers have successfully guided New Horizons toward its target and they’re retrieving data back over radio waves….very slowly The radio waves take 4.5 hours to come all the way from New Horizons to us. NASA has to use 200-foot-wide antennas just to even detect the signal, and typical download speed is 1 kilobit per second. How slow is that exactly? So if you had an image that’s 1024 pixels wide, it would take about 40 minutes just to download it. That’s 50 times slower than the dialup modems from the 90s. And one of the key pieces of data New Horizons will be retrieving is good photos of Pluto. Right now we don't have any good photos of Pluto. The best things we have, from the Hubble space telescope -- it still looks like a blurry blob. But New Horizons is going to return historic, high-definition photos of Pluto. It already got some great shots of Jupiter when it flew by in 2007 to use the giant planet’s gravity as a slingshot. So right now New Horizons is traveling at over 31,000 miles per hour — and it's pretty much used up all its fuel so it can't slow down as it approaches the target, so all the observations will happen quickly. And after that? After that, New Horizons is just going to keep going and in 2019, engineers will fly it past another small, icy body at the edge of the solar system to collect more data. And as for Pluto, it will continue on around the sun, taking 248 years to complete one revolution. That means that the entire history of the United States has unfolded in the time it's taken Pluto to orbit the Sun once. The last time Pluto was in its current position, we didn't understand how species evolved or how germs transmitted diseases. Wow. Aviation was still decades away — and spaceflight wouldn't happen for nearly 200 years. But this time around, when Pluto finishes an orbit, it's going to be met by a tiny robot sent by a curious species of apes living on a planet billions of miles away.

Channel: Vox

Views: 1,690,951

Rating: 4.8948755 out of 5

Keywords: vox, news, current events, world, cnn, vice, fox, msnbc, breakdown, eli5, NASA (Spacecraft Manufacturer), Pluto (Astronomical Discovery), Astronomy (Field Of Study), space, new horizons, New Horizons (Space Mission), dwarf planet, charon, solar system, Spacecraft (Industry), Space Exploration (Literature Subject), launch

Id: Eo3EJYo2dX8

Length: 3min 46sec (226 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/octatone]

That didn't tell me anything about how it got there :/

[u/mobird53]

Anyone else see Voyager from Star Trek just above the moon in the Jupiter picture. It looks just like it

[u/ftwin]

Shit, that's been traveling there, on the same mission, for almost 10 years?

[u/Chuck_j1995]

This is a really cool video! It taught me a lot that I didn't know about New Horizon. Thank you for sharing this!

[u/BrownieBalls]

How far away can it get before we lose contact when it just goes off the edge of our solar system?