9 years to fly there and 9 hours to get a response back
The biggest event this summer was the New Horizons flyby Pluto. I never managed to get myself to write about it but I was watching all the photos and reading all about it. And get very excited. But the best is still to come. Because of the speed the New Horizons needed to achieve - fastest thing we ever sent - it was so tiny it could only look at one direction. This meant it could either collect the data or send it back to us. So when it was speeding by Pluto it was collecting data and now it starts sending it back for real.
We already learned a lot new things from the data we got before. We got baffled by discovery of icy plains and a geologically active world. We started naming what we saw - I mean really naming it after creatures of underworld. Everything we got so far was just a teaser - even all the beautiful photos of Pluto's heart and the all the details about its moons - from all the ones we barely knew existed to Charon's weird mountain inside a canyon. And including this view of what the New Horizons saw during fly by:
Next stop for New Horizons - the Kupier Belt - Object MU69 is coming in January 2019.
We already learned a lot new things from the data we got before. We got baffled by discovery of icy plains and a geologically active world. We started naming what we saw - I mean really naming it after creatures of underworld. Everything we got so far was just a teaser - even all the beautiful photos of Pluto's heart and the all the details about its moons - from all the ones we barely knew existed to Charon's weird mountain inside a canyon. And including this view of what the New Horizons saw during fly by:
Click to viewNext stop for New Horizons - the Kupier Belt - Object MU69 is coming in January 2019.