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Ed Yeates ReportingNo sooner has Stardust landed in our own backyard, now NASA has a rocket poised for launch tomorrow to take another spacecraft even farther into space. It was supposed to happen today, but high winds have temporarily scrubbed the launch of what is called the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Hopefully, that spacecraft will lift off tomorrow.
The Stardust capsule, with samples from a comet, re-entered the earth's atmosphere faster than any spacecraft has done before. Now, tomorrow - if all goes well - another spacecraft, New Horizons, will fire away from the earth faster than anything has before.
Seth Jarvis, Director, Clark Planetarium: "It's necessary to go this fast if you want to get to Pluto in anyone's lifetime."
Pluto is way out there, and even though it will take nine years to get there, New Horizons is traveling mighty fast.
Seth Jarvis: "The astronauts went to the moon in three days. This vehicle will travel that distance in nine hours."
It's hard enough to imagine the distance between our own earth and our neighbor Mars at 35 to 40 million miles, but the New Horizons spacecraft is going much farther. We're talking about a distance of 3,647 million miles.
New Horizons won't be gathering samples like Stardust did, but will be visually and electronically documenting things we've never seen before.
Seth Jarvis: "Pluto is the edge of the planetary solar system. It's the beginning of the Kuiper Belt. It's when the deep, deep freeze of the creation of the solar system was."
After nine years of travel, New Horizons will collect all of its data in one frantic 24 hour pass of Pluto.
Things are flying through space in a flurry now. Like Stardust, another space capsule will soon be bringing more pieces of a comet back to Utah.
Seth Jarvis: "The Japanese mission to a comet has actually landed on a comet, blasted material off the comet, collected it and the sample return mission will be coming back in a couple of years."
After New Horizons finishes with Pluto, NASA plans to send it beyond the edge, into the mysterious Kuiper Belt where comets are as big as earth.
