NASA’s New
Horizons probe has left the inner planets of the Solar System behind as it streaks
toward a rendezvous with Pluto and its moons.
The spacecraft, billed as NASA’s
fastest-flying probe, hurtled past the orbit of Mars – though not the planet
itself – Friday on its way towards a Jupiter flyby and its more distant target Pluto.
“It’s
pretty amazing,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan
Stern told SPACE.com. “It’s
a straight line across the Solar System. There are hardly any curves because
this is so fast.”
New Horizons sped past Mars’
orbit some 151 million miles (243 million kilometers) from the Sun at a rate of
about 13 miles (21 kilometers) per second. The red planet, however, trailed
behind the spacecraft at a distance of about 186 million miles (299 million
kilometers), mission managers said, adding that New Horizons was closer to
Earth than Mars.
NASA launched
New Horizons, a piano-sized spacecraft weighing about 1,054 pounds (478 kilogram),
atop a Lockheed Martin-built Atlas 5 rocket – its most powerful booster – to fling
the Pluto-probe spaceward on Jan. 19, 2006.
Six of the probe’s seven science
instruments have already been checked
for their health as the spacecraft heads towards Jupiter, where it will use
the giant planet’s gravity to boost its way on to Pluto and the icy
object-filled Kuiper Belt.
But first, the spacecraft must pass
through the Asteroid
Belt, which despite its reputation is primarily made up of empty space
rather than a teeming rock field, mission managers said.
“We won’t be hit,” said Stern, the
executive director of the space science and engineering division at the
Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “We won’t even come close
enough to make any useful science observations of asteroids. They’re really
very far apart.”
New Horizons is expected to fly past
Pluto and its moons July 2015. The spacecraft is due to make its closest
approach to Jupiter on Feb. 28, 2007.
advertisement
