Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Space travel


The dream of spaceflight for humans is exactly that: a dream. Consider Voyager I - after nearly 40 years of traveling over 37,000 mph it is just reaching the edge of the solar system. The Enterprise can do that in a few minutes.

New Horizons: Today the spacecraft finally reached Pluto, its main mission. It was launched in 2006 and sped directly to the dwarf planet. Other solar system spacecraft have used "gravity-assist" methods to reach speeds and trajectories to accomplish their missions. New Horizons used a gravity assist from Jupiter to place in its path to Pluto and speed it up. It still took 9 years to get there. Voyager I and II used Jupiter for assist and Voyager II used the gravity of Jupiter to change course towards Saturn then Saturn's gravity to pass Uranus then that planet's gravity to change course again to Neptune. Today's visit to Pluto marks discovery missions to all nine planets (in 1977 Pluto was still classified as a planet).

NASA's software "NASA's Eyes" is a great way to see where the current spacecraft of discovery are today in real time. Each time the program is started it downloads positions of all the planets and updates graphics to display them. http://eyes.nasa.gov/