New Horizons Mission Launch Video
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Video courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. |
This video shows the launch of the New Horizons spacecraft in January 2006. New Horizons, bound for a rendezvous with Pluto in 2015, rocketed skyward from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 2 PM on January 19, 2006. The spacecraft was carried aloft by an Atlas V launch vehicle.
Note: If you cannot see the movie you may need to download the latest QuickTime player.
New Horizons zoomed away from our planet at the highest
speed of any spacecraft leaving Earth so far... it was traveling at 16.21 km/s
(36,300 mph) when its engine shut down! The speedy spacecraft zoomed past the
Moon's orbit just nine hours later... a much quicker trip than the three days
required by Apollo astronauts to reach
our Moon.
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More New Horizons mission movies:
Animation of the New Horizons mission (6.4 MB)
Animation of the trajectory of New Horizons through our Solar System (4.7 MB)
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