PSA: Hey, don't forget to register to win the Sam Neill DVDs!
New Horizons is one of the fastest probes ever launched by humans. Even so, it'll take another eight years to get to Pluto, its primary target. But it would take longer if it didn't steal energy from Jupiter in a process called a gravity assist (it catches up to Jupiter from behind, if you will, and absorbs some of Jupiter's orbital momentum, accelerating the probe a lot and slowing Jupiter an eensy weensy bit). But the folks who run the NH program aren't ones to let an opportunity pass -- or to pass an opportunity. They aimed NH's very sophisticated cameras at the monster planet and took a set of incredible images (there are 4 gigabytes of images in all, and 70% have been sent back so far). There were many purposes for getting the images. There are ...
