THE fastest spacecraft ever built will be launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida tomorrow to explore the last frontier of the solar system.
At 6.24pm GMT, 17 years after it was first proposed, the piano-sized New Horizons probe will blast off aboard an Atlas V rocket for Pluto, the only one of the Sun’s planets yet to be visited by Man.
Even at 36,000mph — 100 times faster than a passenger jet — the nuclear-powered craft will take nine years to complete the 4 billion-mile (6.4 billion km) one-way trip.
New Horizons will fly past Jupiter in a year’s time and, when it arrives at Pluto in 2015, will conduct a five-month survey.
Many astronomers believe that Pluto does not really deserve the status of a planet at all. Its composition, size and orbit set it apart from the Sun’s eight other planets and it is widely accepted that it would not have been given planetary status if it had been discovered more recently.
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Instead it is often classed as an “ice dwarf” — a kind of overgrown frozen asteroid. Many other ice dwarfs orbit the Sun in the solar system’s outer rim, a region known as the Kuiper Belt.
After surveying Pluto and its moon, Charon, at close quarters, New Horizons will fly further out into the Kuiper Belt.