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The Question & Answer (Q&A) Knowledge Managenet
The Internet has many places to ask questions about anything imaginable and find past answers on almost everything.
9.5 years
Launched in 2006, New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft to ever leave Earth. It crossed the orbit of Jupiter the next year and has been traveling nearly a million miles a day—but it still took 9.5 years for the spacecraft to reach Pluto and its moons.
4.6 hours
So let me give you some context. Light itself takes 4.6 hours to travel from the Earth to Pluto. If you wanted to send a signal to Pluto, it would take 4.6 hours for your transmission to reach Pluto, and then an additional 4.6 hours for their message to return to us. Let’s talk spacecraft.
The $720 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006, speeding away from Earth at a record-breaking 36,400 mph (58,580 km/h). Even at that blistering pace, it still took the probe 9.5 years to reach Pluto, which was about 3 billion miles (5 billion km) from Earth on the day of the flyby.
Parker Solar Probe
The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system.
Currently voted the best answer. The distance from Earth to Pluto is not constant, but averages to 3.57 billion miles. The Space Shuttle orbits at 17,500 miles per hour. Therefore 205,000 hours or 8,500 days or 23 years 105 days. With a solar sail, said craft would reach Pluto in “less than five years.
The short answer to that question is: Pluto is far away — very far away, more than 30 times Earth’s distance from the Sun — so New Horizons’ radio signal is weak. Weak signal means low data rates: at the moment, New Horizons can transmit at most 1 kilobit per second.
If you wanted to send a signal to Pluto, it would take 4.6 hours for your transmission to reach Pluto, and then an additional 4.6 hours for their message to return to us. When it finally reaches Pluto, it’ll be going about 50,000 km/h.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto. After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface — roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai,…