NEW YORK: NASA added another groundbreaking success into its already robust list of accomplishments. The space agency’s vaunted New Horizons spacecraft crafted another first as it reaches icy cold Pluto in a memorable fashion.
By the time the spacecraft snapped photos of the planet it coincided with the 109th birthday of the enigmatic Clyde Tombaugh (February 4, 1906 – January 17, 1997). The American astronomer happens to be the discoverer of the obscure dwarf planet in 1930. The feat is also great for the human race as Pluto is 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away from Earth, this length of distance is so enormous.
NASA is expecting that New Horizons will be at its nearest distance to Pluto on June, 2015, which would be the first ever for any spacecraft and according to Real Science it’s making one pass as it goes deeper into space and hopefully to another Kepler belt object.
The co-investigator of the New Horizons mission Randy Gladstone quipped that, “We are a long way out there with a tiny spacecraft. It may take about a year to get all that data back so eventually it will all come back and we’ll have plenty to play with for the next 10 years.”
Gladstone explained, “There is this whole new area out there called the outer solar system where the Kuiper Belt is, Pluto is a member of the Kuiper Belt, but there’s thousands of them out there, and there’s many, many objects the size of Pluto out there that are very interesting looking and they’re a key component of the solar system. The way they were distributed helped form the entire solar system.”
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