New Horizons

Today, New Horizons is 1/4 done with it's journey to Pluto. As of May 29, the spacecraft was 9.97 AU from Sol, speeding away at 18.31 km s^-1.

New Horizons has crossed the orbit of Saturn!

Oct 15 will mark the 1,000th day since New Horizons was launched.

This is amazing.

Also once again reaffirms that space is utterly huge, fastest thing we have yet sent out has gotten around 1.21 au farther out in 4 months.

New Horizon's progress...

That's more than a third now.

Seems i'm unable to enter the new horizon's website. Does anyone knows what happened?
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ shows a forbidden error.... do they saw something they don't want us to know? (x-files music)

That's odd. Perhaps it's down for maintenance?
Edit: The site is back up now.

thanks , i'm browsing it rigth now. Maybe was maintenance

New Horizon's progress again.... (I'm unsure what happened to the January image).

nearly 1.7 AU in 7 months, that's fantastic. we're about 7-8 AU's from Uranus orbit and close to midpoint in the journey.

anyone notice that it seems to be slowing down as it gets further out from the Sun? why does that happen?

all I know is I can't wait to see the pictures!

anyone notice that it seems to be slowing down as it gets further out from the Sun? why does that happen?

Throw something up in the air and watch it. It slows down, reverses direction, and falls back. Why? Gravity. The same thing is happening with the New Horizons spacecraft. As it goes away from the sun, the gravitational pull slows it down. But New Horizons is going so fast that the sun won't be able to pull on it hard enough to get New Horizons to stop and fall back -- New Horizons has escape velocity. It will continue to slow down indefinitely, but the rate at which it slows will decrease as it gets farther from the sun, due to the decreasing gravitational pull (gravitational attraction decreases with distance).

Unless it gets boosted by the pull of another body , that is.

Is the New Horizonts heading toward some interesting star ? Can't find a way to determine it

I've heard the question asked before, and the answer was "no". I don't know much more than that.

They could at least aim it for Alpha Centauri. Unless of course Pluto is in the complete opposite direction.

as long as we're on that, how long would New Horizons take to reach Alpha Centauri at it's present velocity?