Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Zooming through the outer reaches of the solar system, A NASA spacecraft just clocked a distance 60 times farther from the sun than Earth.
The extraordinary benchmark announced this week means the New Horizons probe has doubled its 2015 distance, when it was snapping pictures of Pluto and its moons.
Perhaps more surprising than this intangible deep-space milestone is the one this intrepid spacecraft hasn't reached yet: the outer edge of the solar system's Kuiper Belt, a disk beyond Neptune of countless comets and thousands of tiny ice worlds. The far-flung region is littered with leftover rubble from the time when primitive planets were forming.
Scientists had expected the spacecraft to arrive at the proverbial edge about 1 billion miles ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 06 2024, @11:16AM (2 children)
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 06 2024, @11:34AM
s/see/See/
See comment.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Sunday October 06 2024, @02:15PM
Fixed. Thank you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by YeaWhatevs on Sunday October 06 2024, @12:18PM (1 child)
1 AU is 92,955,807 miles. It should have gotten to the edge 10.75 AU ago, at 49.25 AU. I guess saying it was 1 billion overdue on a 5 billion mile journey didn't seem impressive. Kind of like AGI is due in "thousands of days", but once you start converting you realize that is 10 to 20 years out, the same sorts of claims every researcher seeking funding makes. I guess CompSci has officially entered the hall of grifters, and I am saddened by it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Freeman on Monday October 07 2024, @02:26PM
Hold up now, how are we to really know just how far 1AU is in football fields? Regulation football fields of course. No, we don't know what that "Foooootbol" thing is, we're Americans!
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"