“Because Pluto is almost 3 billion miles away, it will take 4.5 hours of travel time at the speed of light for the all-clear signal to reach Earth.”
The speed of light, for those that don’t know, is 186,000 miles per second!
The craft will not be communicating with earth during the closest approach but will continue sending back data from it for months.
Its kind of cool keeping an eye on the real time simulation with NASAeyes. http://eyes.nasa.gov/
Thought I’d have some fun with this. Figures here were probably fudged a bit for easier understanding.
I calculate the time for light to travel here from 3 billion miles at 186,000 mps.
It actually works at as 4.48 hours, a smidgen more at 5 places.
This amounts to 72 seconds short of the 4.5 hours they mentioned.
During that extra 72 second, the message traveled 13,392,000 miles past earth.
All of a sudden....that seems so slow.
The Solar system has a lot of empty space...
http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
after scrolling right a bit an icon appears at the lower right which will allow one to travel at light speed.
Yeah, but only on the straightaways.
What is it for those of us who do know?