Aiming for Pluto and Hitting It – the Incredible Size of Space

Moon one Pixel
Picture Credit: http://www.joshworth.com

If you ever want to visualize the incredible size of just our solar system, and how it is almost completely empty, go to this website by Josh Worth.

On that site you can scroll from the sun to the various planets, and as you scroll, you “feel” how small the planets are and how far they are away. If the moon were the size of a pixel, as seen in the picture above, Earth would a tiny dot of a few pixels and about 35 millimeters away from the moon.

Pluto is smaller than the moon. The moon has a diameter of 3,474 km, and Pluto only 2,368 km. It’s only 18% the moon’s mass. So it would be smaller than a pixel, and could not even be seen on this scale.

However, on this scale, it would still be about 685 meters away from this point. That’s about a third of a mile or the length of about seven football fields.

So, if the Earth were the size of this dot on this picture, then Pluto would be a speck of dust a third of a mile away.

The New Horizons spacecraft left Earth in January 2006 and has traveled more than eight years. It’s the fastest human-made object ever, traveling about 100 times faster than a modern jetliner. And it has been on the way for eight years leaving that blue speck on the screen aiming for that speck of dust 685 meters away.

And it’s going to hit it three days from now.

 

Leave a Reply