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Space 101: A Long, Long Way from Beautiful Pluto

pluto

The spacecraft which had reached the planet Pluto (yes, it is a planet now) is now one of the fastest man-made craft with a relative velocity of 49,600 km/h – the record is still held by Voyager 1, currently travelling at 61,720 km/h relative to the Sun. Poster source: http://www.theplanetstoday.com

We have passed the half of this year and considering what we have gone through so far, one hopes that the year would end sooner than expected. But before that, when it comes to the topic of science and space, 3 things would have made the year 2015 very sweet indeed.

One would be the NASA spacecraft New Horizons passes by Pluto.

And frankly speaking, Pluto never looked so beautiful before this and with radio signals taking four and a half hours to travel between the spacecraft and Earth, the spacecraft can only transmit data at 1 to 2 Kbps, which means that the transmission of all data (for last 10 years) will require sixteen months (source: Wikipedia).

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