No, I didn’t shoot that one. NASA’s New Horizons probe has just hurtled past Jupiter to pick up speed on its way out to visit Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Because of the limitations of sending back tons of data from hundreds of millions of miles away, the probe has buffered up all of the pictures and data it collected and will be sending them back in the coming weeks. So that website will definitely be worth keeping an eye on in the near future. What they’ve showed so far bodes well for some pretty cool stuff to come.
It’s worth looking around that site anyway if for nothing other than the mind-bogglingness (is that a word?) of it all. The fact that the probe has made it to Jupiter in a bit more than a year, and is now traveling at nearly 50,000 mph after the gravity assist, but still won’t be reaching Pluto until 2015 is a humbling reminder of how big it is out there.
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