USATODAY.com – New Horizons probe starts 3 billion-mile trek to Pluto
“The U.S has a spacecraft on its way to Pluto, on to the Kuiper Belt and on to the stars,” said mission scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., at a post-launch briefing.
Next year, a gravity “slingshot” boost from the planet Jupiter will push the probe’s speed up to 47,000 mph, cutting three to five years of time from a more than 3 billion-mile trip to Pluto.
I can’t wait until July 14, 2015 when the probe arrives at Pluto, it’s finds should be interesting. Pluto can perhaps tell us many interesting things about our solar system, maybe even how it formed.