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01-20-2006, 08:54 AM
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World`s first Pluto mission launched
World`s first Pluto mission launched Cape Canaveral, Jan 20: The world`s first mission to Pluto blasted into space on Thursday after its launch aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket to begin a 9 1/2-year journey to the only unexplored planet in the solar system.
"It`s now our job to be good stewards of the spacecraft. and to learn to fly it in the real environment that it was built for," Alan Stern, the mission`s lead scientist from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told a post-launch news conference.  "The launch team did a great job of getting us on our way," added project manager Glen Fountain, with the Johns Hopkins University`s Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed the spacecraft. After two days of delays due to poor weather and a power outage, the 197-foot-tall (60-metre-tall) rocket, built by Lockheed Martin Corp., lifted off at 2 p.m. (1900 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The launch team remained on edge until 45 minutes later when the plutonium-powered spacecraft finally and successfully separated from the Atlas` second and last upper-stage rocket booster. The engine firings made the probe, called New Horizons, soar at more than 10 miles per second, or 36,000 mph (58,000 kph) -- the fastest man-made object ever to leave Earth`s orbit. If the Apollo astronauts had been launched at that speed, the trip to the moon would have taken about nine hours instead of three days, according to Colleen Hartman, NASA`s associate administrator for space science. Even so, New Horizons, which is about the size of a baby-grand piano, will need to bounce off Jupiter`s gravity field, in a "slingshot" maneuver that will give it added velocity, to make its 3 billion mile journey to Pluto in less than a decade. High winds at the Florida launch site forced the first scrub of the launch of the New Horizons spacecraft on Tuesday, followed on Wednesday by a storm-triggered power outage at the mission control center in Laurel, Maryland. With an unprecedented five solid-fuel strap-on boosters, the largest expendable rocket in the U.S. fleet sent the relatively small spacecraft hurtling into the sky and it quickly disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. 
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