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And it gets great mileage, too
October 22nd, 2008 | Tags: New Horizons, Pluto | Published in did you know? | 2 Comments
The fastest machine ever built is the robotic spacecraft New Horizons. It’s on its way to Pluto—at more than 50,000 mph relative to the sun. At that speed, you could travel from Tokyo to London in less than eight minutes.
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October 23rd, 2008at 9:32 pm(#)
According to wikipedia and honeysucklecreek, the Helios probes reached roughly 250,000 km/h (roughly 155,000 mph) at perihelion.
Perhaps you were referring to escape velocity from the Sun. But according to this New Horizons page, Voyager 1 will always be faster because of its advantage of multiple gravity assists.
October 23rd, 2008at 9:53 pm(#)
The New Horizons site listed the speed of the probe during the Jupiter encounter as 23 kps, as opposed to Voyager’s velocity of 17 kps–and that’s where I got confused, because you’re right, when New Horizons leaves the solar system it will do so more slowly than Voyager 1. And I was ignorant of the Helios probes. So thanks for the good information!