It is the fastest spaceship ever launched and has been hurtling towards its target at a staggering 36,000mph for the past nine years. But now Nasa engineers are preparing to put their robot craft, New Horizons, on its final course – to the tiny world of Pluto.
Scheduled to reach its target on 14 July, New Horizons has already covered more than three billion miles since its launch, a distance that means signals from the spacecraft now take about 4.5 hours to reach our planet.
And the spaceship is travelling at such a speed that even tiny grains of dust have the potential to inflict serious damage if they strike the craft. “We have got round that problem in a very ingenious manner,” the mission’s principal investigator, Alan Stern, told the Observer. “We have given the craft a bullet-proof jacket. To be more precise, we have covered it in Kevlar, the material used to make body armour. That should protect it.”
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