Im suprised no one else has made a thread about this but NASA launched a spaceshuttle headed for Pluto.
It was launched today( 1-19-06) at 2pm EST from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft will study Charon (Pluto’s moon) and Pluto. It will take around 9 years to get to the planet traveling at a speed around 36,000 mph. It will take around 9 hours to go past the Earth’s moon (in about 2 hours from this post) a feat that use to take around 3 days with Apollo 11 (I believe it was 11.)
Hope it makes it. Good luck to it and the crew of NASA.
Kelly: I hate to be the one to break it to you, kid, but his is patently false information.
You’re the only one who believes what you read in the newspapers, and I want to let you know from the burst of PMs I got after you posted this, that people are snickering behind your back.
You prolly bellieve man has walked on the moon. Wow, are you out there!
I hope I am still around in 9 years to see if the space craft gets to it’s target.
I have been very impressed with the recent Stardust space craft. The fact that they can launch a rocket, have it travel through space for several years, meet an object out there somewhere then return to an almost pinpoint landing in the desert of Utah is astounding.
New Horizons will reach Jupiter in approximately one year (an eight year Journey for the Cassini probe currently orbiting Jupiter!), and slingshot directly to Pluto from there. Note that it will be travelling way too fast to stop at Pluto, and will simply be taking pictures on the way by. This technique was also used by the highly successful Voyager space probes which made a grand tour of all the outer planets (except Pluto) and sent back some truly epic photos.
The Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit & Opportunity) are now about two Earth years old. Not bad considering the expected mission length was about three months. I would encourage people near an IMAX theater to check out the new film on them.
There are a lot more incredible Mars missions coming, too. The Mars Science Lander is currently in development, and hopefully will be launched within five years. Phoenix, another Mars lander, should be launched in early 2007. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is in flight to Mars currently, and will return more information from the red planet than all other previous missions combined!
(I tend to get excited when talking about this stuff. I love my job:D)
what I don’t get about space exploration is, why? Why are we going out there? The amount of $ used for space exploration could be used to feed many people, and other useful, earthly purposes.
I just can’t possibly think of any good reason why we are out there. Anyone?
We are explores, there is nothing wrong with gathering knowledge, it’s what we do with it that matters. The violence of war is a much greater waste in so many ways.
I don’t remember the source, (it’s been a while!) but it was estimated around 1990 that the Apollo missions had created 7 dollars, for every dollar spent, in newly developed technology. The mission’s demands for compact silicon circuits provided the production facilities that went on to fuel the IC boom and associated applications.
Another example is one of the cameras developed solely for the Hubble. It ended up being extremely useful for the early detection of breast cancer.
Investments in the cutting edge fields of science fuel technological growth when the developments are made available, rather than being socked away in the corporate patent vault.
Were I being negative I would say that if the money had been spent purely on the research it would have created much more than 7 dollars for every one spent. No need to light the blue touch paper at all. Did we really need to go to the moon in order to invent Teflon?
However I feel so priviledged to have been around at the time these flights took place, and look at all the new pictures of planets and moons with the same fascination as the day when I saw my first rainbow.
It is very interesting to read all the latest theories on how these moons came to be as they are.
36,000 mph, they should have gotten Chuck Norris to round house kick it up (aparently his kicks are faster then light) and he also has practice, every year he throws a kid into the sun
as for tims question, we should keep exsporing so that we can spread the population out over other planets rather then one. can you imagine if back in the 1100s (or earlyer) if we didn’t try to get to north amarica? we would all be living in little tiny hoses and have no room to uni on
I made a couple of factual errors: Cassini orbits Saturn, not Jupiter. It was launched in October 1997, and had its closest approach to Jupiter in December 2000. That makes the journey just over three years long. Cassini’s trip to Saturn took about eight years.
Yes. The race to the moon was the motivation. Even if it was driven by political “necessities” of the time, it accomplished much more than getting the guys there and bringing them back.
What we need now is motivation for the next big project. We sure lost a lot of momentum once the moon problem was solved. NASA started shrinking in 1967 or earlier, at least two years before Apollo 11. All the big research was already winding down at that point. The pace has been much slower since then.
For Tim:
Did people say the same thing about Columbus? About Lewis & Clark? How about Charles Lindberg? Why fly across the Atlantic when a boat will get you there a lot more reliably?
This little planet has one ecosystem, and several billion of us, constantly expanding, threatening to screw it up in countless ways. I’m for hedging the species’ bets and looking for new territories before it’s too late.
