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A thought struck me that I find amazing. New Horizon's is traveling over 2.6x the distance from the Earth to the Moon in a day. Average distance is 384403km. NH is moving faster than 1 million km per day.

It took the Apollo crafts about 3 days and 4 hours to reach the Moon (specifically 3 days, 3 hours, 49 minutes).

Even at New Horizon's speed, it takes 10 years to reach Pluto.

Damn, space is big.




In elementary school, I charted out the average distance of each planet (yeah, in those days I called Pluto a planet) from the sun on common scale on an adding machine tape. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars were all very close to the beginning end of the tape. The outer planets were far, far away, and the tape wrapped around several walls of my elementary school classroom. Yep, space is big.

And all the distances within the solar system are beggared by the distances between distinct stars in our galaxy, not to mention the distances among different galaxies. Arthur C. Clarke wrote an essay about these facts, titled "We'll Never Conquer Space."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#We.27ll_Never_...




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