Target Pluto: fastest spaceship set for epic encounter with our remotest planet
It is the fastest spaceship ever launched and has been hurtling towards its target at a staggering 36,000mph for the past nine years. But now Nasa engineers are preparing to put their robot craft, New Horizons, on its final course – to the tiny world of Pluto.
Scheduled to reach its target on 14 July, New Horizons has already covered more than three billion miles since its launch, a distance that means signals from the spacecraft now take about 4.5 hours to reach our planet.
And the spaceship is travelling at such a speed that even tiny grains of dust have the potential to inflict serious damage if they strike the craft. “We have got round that problem in a very ingenious manner,” the mission’s principal investigator, Alan Stern, told the Observer. “We have given the craft a bullet-proof jacket. To be more precise, we have covered it in Kevlar, the material used to make body armour. That should protect it.”
Perched at the edge of our solar system, Pluto has remained a mysterious world ever since its discovery in 1930. It has an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane and a surface temperature of about minus 230C. It is so distant that to anyone there, the sun would appear as a single point of light, albeit a bright one. Despite its bitterly cold surface, scientists believe it could possess an underground liquid ocean.
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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/11/pluto-new-horizons-spaceship-epic-encounter-planet
