By Anupum Pant
NASA’s new horizon spacecraft will reach close to the icy dwarf planet pluto in July 2015, and when it does, it will be huge. That’s because pluto is astoundingly far away. To comprehend how far it is, consider this.
It is 5 Billion kilometres away. That means it would take 4.6 hours for a signal sent from here to reach that distance. And if the spacecraft wishes to send us back a reply to that, it would take 4.6 hours to travel back. That’s how much time it takes light to travel.
This spacecraft travels way faster than any human is travelling right now. That’s faster than the ISS going around the earth. And still it would take 9 years to reach the dwarf planet, since it was launched in the year 2006.