Mission to Pluto: The Story Behind the Historic Trip

(digital music)

The New Horizons Spacecraft is one of the fastest things

we've ever launched off the surface of the planet.

The New Horizons Spacecraft is traveling

about 14 kilometers per second.

Another way of putting that is about 36,000 miles per hour.

And even at that it's taken us nine years

to cross the distance between the Earth to Pluto.

Crossing three billion miles of space.

That's a hard thing to picture.

This is really just opening a door to a whole new realm.

There is the third realm of our solar system,

which is Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

The very best images of Pluto are so pixelated

they're so poor because of the great distance.

Three billion miles.

By the time we get our best images back from New Horizons

they'd be the equivalent if we were flying

over New York at the same altitude,

of looking down on Manhattan and not just

seeing Central Park but counting the ponds in Central Park

and the wharfs on the Hudson.

Our data rate to the spacecraft right now,

since it's so far away it's one kilobit per second.

Because it's five hours of light time

away from where we are.

And with all of the data that we're taking

through the few days leading up to the Pluto fly by

and then a few days afterwards,

it's gonna take us a whole year

to download all of that data.

It's been kind of interesting over my entire career.

You know which is the most favored planet of everybody?

It's Pluto.

All ages. All walks of life. Everybody loves Pluto.