NASA’s New Horizons Mission Flies by Pluto
It’s traveled some three billion miles from Earth, on a journey that has taken more than nine years, but today NASA’s New Horizons probe finally reached its destination, hurtling past Pluto and its moons at a speed of more than 30,000 mph.
MIT planetary science Professor Richard Binzel has been studying Pluto for 35 years, but the astronomer still has plenty of questions about the mysterious icy dwarf planet, that he hopes the NASA mission will answer.
As Binzel tells our partner WGBH, you can “learn a lot about Pluto from the ground with the best telescopes, but soon you run into a wall.” He says, “You reach a limit that you just simply can’t answer any more questions until you go there.”
The Takeaway speaks with Binzel, a science team co-investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, which is running the mission. Binzel explains his expectations for this exciting moment in space exploration, which he says is right up there with the Lewis and Clark expedition in its significance.
The music in today's segment was performed by Takeaway Host John Hockenberry. Click on the audio player above to listen.
