New Horizons has traveled 3 billion miles to reach Pluto — nearly 10 years of travel at speeds of up to 100,000 mph. It is closing in on Pluto at 38,000 mph.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank, writing recently for National Public Radio, calculated the time it would take to drive to Pluto at 65 mph — 6,293 years. You could fly there in a Boeing 727 in 680 years.
This is why even the most advanced telescopes on Earth see Pluto as a point of light. It’s far away and it’s tiny. It doesn’t glow brightly like a star.
Pluto is 4,000 times too faint to be resolved by the human eye. The Hubble space telescope could gather only a handful of pixels on its images of Pluto. It showed some light and dark patches but resolved no features.
“It’s very tiny in the sky,” said Mark Sykes, CEO and director of the Planetary Science Institute. “You have to go there to see it and we finally have. It’s taken nine years and that’s going like a bat out of hell.”
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New Horizons, when it speeds by Pluto on Tuesday, will show the planet in detail. Stern compares it to flying over Manhattan and being able to count the ponds in Central Park and the wharfs on the Hudson River.
