2001 Days in Space

The New Horizons space probe is a half-ton science platform made by the good folks at NASA, and in 2006 it was sent hurtling towards the dwarf planet Pluto (no, it's not an official planet anymore; get over it, Clyde Tombaugh fans). Why is it going there? Because we basically don't know shit about Pluto. We know it has 3 moons, a pathetic excuse for an atmosphere, and some slight color variations. That's basically it. Pluto orbits so far out from the sun that it's too dim for astronomers to get a good look at its features. This mission aims to change that.

This blurry smear that could easily double as a vaseline-covered photo of mold on a petri dish is our best view of Pluto.

And this was taken after the Hubble telescope's image correction missions.

New Horizons has been floating through the cold void of outer space for 2001 days as of this writing. Actually, as of the writing of this very sentence, it has been up there for 2001 days, 55 minutes and 3 seconds since it was launched. It's one of the fastest spacecraft ever to leave the planet, reaching about 10 miles a second after launch. In layman's terms, that's going really goddamn fast. It is going even faster now after a quick and dirty fling with Jupiter that left it speeding out of the solar system at over 50,000 MPH to avoid paying child support. New Horizons ain't payin' for no baby-mama drama!

 "One of these days Alice... Bang! Zoom! To da moon dwarf planet Pluto!"

You can find out exactly how long it has been up there by going here: New Horizons official mission page.
The plucky little space traveler is equipped with a bevy of scientific instruments with cute names like Alice and PEPSSI. It uses the warm, inviting decay of delicious plutonium (which may have been processed from uranium mined in Hell's Cow Patty) to produce heat and in turn electricity to power itself as it sails far away from the radiative effects of the sun's rays. The plutonium is stored in a rod configuration inside the long black finned cylinder jutting out from the right side of the spacecraft.

I am personally very excited about this mission, because there really aren't too many objects in our solar system that we need to fill in the scientific blanks of. We've already got a satellite named DAWN set to study the largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres, and it has already begun sending valuable data back to Earth. We have tons of different probes orbiting the sun, moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Saturn. NASA is going to launch a probe later this year to orbit Jupiter's poles. There were probes that flew by Uranus and Neptune, and out into the realm of interstellar space. After flying by Pluto, New Horizons is set to target objects in the distant Kuiper belt. Even with our best space-based telescopes, objects in the Kuiper belt look like faint specks of light in the distance. New Horizons should change all that. It will make its closest flyby of Pluto in approximately 4 years from now, in July of 2015.

We are this close to finally knowing what the majority of our solar system's backyard looks like, after eons of gazing out at it through our little Earth-house. It might be a long time until we get a chance to leave our backyard, but we've already taken a few tentative steps in that direction. Soon we might be able to find a nice house down the street to move into. Who knows?