How fast is the new horizons probe

The New Horizons spacecraft was launched in January About 13 months after launch, the spacecraft flew by Jupiter to get a gravity assist, which sped up the spacecraft to around 50, miles per hour. Learn more about how our Sun defines our solar system. After the Jupiter flyby, the spacecraft spent about 7. It only woke up periodically to test its instruments. However, during this time, scientists were still studying Pluto from Earth. These moon discoveries actually caused mission planners to start worrying that the New Horizons spacecraft might encounter more debris in the Pluto system than initially thought.

A combination of telescope observations and computer simulations determined that there was about a 0. In December of , about seven months later, New Horizons woke up from its final hibernation and began preparing for an encounter with Pluto. All was going as planned until 10 days before its closest approach to Pluto.

On July 4, , the spacecraft suddenly went into safe mode! A spacecraft goes into safe mode when it has detected some anomaly with its systems and shuts down all instruments to keep them safe. That factors out to 50 astronomical units AU —or 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun—making New Horizons one of only a small handful of spacecraft to pass that cosmic milestone.

There are a lot of ways to contemplate what a head-spinning distance 50 AU is, but one of the best is to consider that even moving at light speed, commands radioed up from Earth take more than seven hours to reach the spacecraft. They will grow significantly older still before New Horizons is done with its work. That bit of plutonium aboard the spacecraft runs its radio-thermal generator RTG , a nuclear power source that should keep it operating until the late s.

At that point, it will have more than doubled its current distance from Earth, eventually exiting the solar system altogether. In those years and across those miles, the ship will be looking for other Kuiper Belt objects in its path that may warrant a visit, and will be studying the space environment as it sails on to more and more rarefied distances. For all of the miles New Horizons will put on its odometer, it will never set the record for the greatest distance a spacecraft will travel from Earth—the best it can do is come in fifth.

Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in and , are AU and AU away respectively. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Alan Stern, the spacecraft was launched on January 19, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station by an Atlas V rocket directly into an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory with a speed of about Its primary mission was perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in At liftoff, the New Horizons propulsion system included only pounds of hydrazine propellant. Altogether, then, the spacecraft barreled into the solar system with a heliocentric sun-relative speed of nearly thousand miles per hour.

The timing of the launch was critical. Based on the orbital position of the Earth, NASA was looking at a short window, from mid-January through early February , in which the New Horizons spacecraft could be launched in order to make a close pass by Jupiter in And we needed Jupiter big time. Thanks to its quick start, New Horizons made the million mile journey to Jupiter in just over a year, faster than any of the seven previous Jupiter-bound missions.

Jupiter would help New Horizons regain what it had lost. To balance the books, Jupiter lost as much kinetic energy as New Horizons gained, causing it to fall a little closer to the sun. A year on Jupiter today is slightly shorter than it was before—all because humans wanted to get a good look at Pluto.

As you can see, Voyager 2 used several gravity assists to keep up a quick pace as it toured the planets in our outer solar system.