New Horizons Salutes Voyager
- From: baalke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 17 Aug 2006 08:41:48 -0700
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/081706.html
New Horizons Salutes Voyager
August 17, 2006
As New Horizons cruised toward the edge of the asteroid belt and a date
with Jupiter, the spacecraft that revolutionized our knowledge of that
giant planet more than 25 years ago made history again this week. On
Aug. 15, NASA's enduring Voyager 1, already Earth's farthest-flung
robotic ambassador, became the first spacecraft to reach a distance of
100 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun.
That's 100 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, equivalent to
9.3 billion miles or 15 billion kilometers. Though New Horizons will
also reach 100 AU, it will never pass Voyager 1, because Voyager was
boosted by multiple gravity assists that make its speed faster than New
Horizons will travel. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at 17
kilometers per second. When New Horizons reaches that same distance 32
years from now, propelled by a single planetary swingby, it will be
moving about 13 kilometers per second.
"Voyager blazed an historic trail of exploration across the giant
planets and out into the distant heliosphere. Now New Horizons follows,
almost 30 years later, exploring the Sun's population of Kuiper Belt
ice
dwarfs for the first time," says New Horizons Principal Investigator
Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. "From the generation
of
New Horizons explorers to the Voyager generation of explorers, we say
congratulations on reaching 100 AU, you showed us all the way, keep
exploring, onward, ever onward!"
New Horizons will reach 100 AU in December 2038, long after the probe
passes through the Pluto system and enters the Kuiper Belt. But another
milestone occurs much sooner: next week New Horizons crosses the outer
boundary of the main asteroid belt at 3.3 AU (nearly 307 million miles,
or 494 million kilometers) from the Sun, just seven months after
launch.
Read more about Voyagers 1 and 2.
<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1150>
Follow New Horizons on its own voyage.
<http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php>
Media Contact:
Michael Buckley
(240) 228-7536 or (443) 778-7536
michael.buckley@xxxxxxxxxx
.
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