Off to Pluto!

So the launch of the Pluto New Horizions (PNH) vehicle finally happened yesterday at 2pm EST. It will take approximately 9 years to get to Pluto, then it will head off to the Kuiper Belt to check out some Pluto-sized objects. This mission is purely for exploration purposes. Much about Pluto and the outer regions of the Solar System is unknown...I mean Pluto was only discovered like 75 years ago, and the Kuiper Belt is a relatively new area.

The Atlas V rocket that was carrying the PNH was built by Johns Hopkins University in Boston and is powered by plutonium-238 filled Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's). And at 36,256 mph, it is faster than we have ever traveled before! It crossed the orbit of the moon in just under 9 hours! To give you a tangible example of how fast that really is, the Atlas V could get from America's East coast to it's West coast in about 5 minutes!

Something I found very heartwarming is that some of Clyde Tombaugh's (Pluto's discoverer) ashes were aboard the spacecraft, and that his wife and family were here to see the launch. How perfect.

In case I failed to mention what I do for a living, I work at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as a Mission Data Reduction Analyst for Computer Sciences Raytheon. I did some pre-flight calculations for this PNH mission, so I feel pretty good that the launch went off without a hitch :)