Halfway to Pluto

[n2doc]

By Ray Villard | Tue Dec 29, 2009 02:38 AM ET

It's been nothing less than the fastest ever sprint across the solar system.

The half-ton NASA New Horizons probe -- the fasted manmade object ever built -- today crosses the halfway mark on its nearly decade-long odyssey to the dwarf planet Pluto.

Today the probe is equidistant between Earth and Pluto; approximately 1.525 billion miles from both worlds.

The craft is now traveling at 36,900 miles per hour relative to the sun. It is climbing out of the clutches of the sun's "gravity well" fast enough to escape the solar system forever. Now that's a real "getaway special."

If we were traveling along with the probe today, we'd look back and see the sun about 1/15th its diameter as seen from Earth, and less than 1/200th as bright. It shines in the Constellation Gemini, and forms a nearly equilateral triangle with the bright red winter stars Betelgeuse and Aldebaran. Earth glimmers as a diamond almost lost in the sun’s glare. Jupiter and Saturn flank the sun. Even at the halfway point, the ultimate destination Pluto still cannot be seen with the naked eye.

more:

http://news.discovery.com/space/new-horizons-crosses-halfway-point-to-pluto.html

[struggle4progress]

1. New Horizon's February image of the Tvashtar volcanic eruption on Io:

Seeing Red

This New Horizons image of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io was taken at 13:05 Universal Time during the spacecraft's Jupiter flyby on February 28, 2007. It shows the reddish color of the deposits from the giant volcanic eruption at the volcano Tvashtar, near the top of the sunlit crescent, as well as the bluish plume itself and the orange glow of the hot lava at its source ...

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/index.php
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

[Fumesucker]

3. By Jove..

I've been wanting to use that line for years.. :)

[eppur_se_muova]

2. I remember when that drag racer was first unleashed ... :^)

“It’s the fastest spacecraft ever launched,” Colleen Hartman, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for science mission directorate, said of New Horizons during the briefing. “It will get to the Moon in nine hours…it will get to Jupiter in one year and nine months.”

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2043602&mesg_id=2043602