December 2, 2011
How Close Is Close? In the expanse of space, the term "close approach" is relative. The closest spacecraft pass by Pluto before New Horizons was NASA's Voyager 1, which came within 983 million miles (1.58 billion kilometers) of the dwarf planet on Jan. 29, 1986. That's still 10.5757 astronomical units, or more than 10½ times the distance between the Earth and Sun!
It’s taken New Horizons 2,143 days of high-speed flight – covering more than a million kilometers per day for nearly six years—to break the closest-approach mark set by NASA’s Voyager 1 in January 1986. Pluto wasn’t on Voyager’s mission path, but after making historic flybys of Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, the intrepid probe came about 983 million miles (1.58 billion kilometers) from Pluto as it raced to the solar system’s outskirts.
MORE: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20111202.php
gaw
Glenn A. Walsh, Project Director,
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