The New Horizons spacecraft was designed to travel at incredible speed. Compared with a commercial plane that travels at a mere 550 mph, the spacecraft travels at a mind-blowing speed of 36,000 mph making it thousands of times faster than one of the fastest vehicles that fly on Earth.
For some, the concept of speed could be overwhelming but thanks to a Google product developer, everyone can now have a better grasp of how fast New Horizons travels to get to its intended destinations.
Clay Bavor, a VP of product at Google, came up with a GIF that shows what it would look like to watch from an airplane window when traveling at the speeds of a Boeing 747 flying at 550 mph, the SR-71 Blackbird super-spy jet speeding at 2,600 mph, and the New Horizons spacecraft.
Sound travels at over 761 mph, which means that the SR-71 Blackbird's speed is already remarkable traveling more than three times the speed of sound but traveling at 36,000 mph, New Horizons is much faster as shown by the animation.
Flying at 37k feet, this is what it would be like to look out the window of a 747 vs. an SR-71 vs. a New Horizons. pic.twitter.com/ChVsgK77Rl
— Clay Bavor (@claybavor) July 17, 2015
It would take a plane traveling at 36,000 mph only about five minute to reach New York from San Francisco but Bavor said that those who travel at this speed could be turned into a ball of hot plasma. The animation, which Bavor posted on his Twitter account, was already reshared more than 1,200 times.
"Flying at 37k feet, this is what it would be like to look out the window of a 747 vs. an SR-71 vs. a New Horizons," Bavor tweeted.
New Horizons was intentionally built to travel very fast so it could get to Pluto in a reasonable amount of time. Even with its remarkable speed, it still took the spacecraft nine and a half year to get to Pluto. New Horizon's speed though also has its disadvantages.
The spacecraft, for instance, was not able to stop and orbit Pluto because it was traveling so fast. It could have captured closer images of the alien world but the team behind the mission would have to reduce the probe's speed by more than 90 percent if it had to enter the dwarf planet's orbit and this maneuver would have needed 1,000 times more amount of fuel than could be possibly loaded into the spacecraft, which would make the mission impossible because of the extra weight.
Photo: Kevin Gill | Flickr
