It is just me or is it sort of sad that 40 years after just about everyone watched the Apollo missions, you have to dig deeper and deeper to find out what cool stuff Nasa is up to. For example, did you know that earlier this month the New Horizons spacecraft passed the 1/2 way mark to Pluto. 1.34 Billion Miles from Earth, 14 times further out from the Sun than the Earth and the moment came and went….

There really are some very special things to note about this mission. For example now that it has passed the orbit of Saturn, it joins the ranks of only 5 spacecrafts to do so. It is only the second mission (Voyager 2 and its encounter with Neptune being the other)  which has a planned planetary encounter beyond Saturn. If all goes well then it should cross the orbits of Uranus and Neptune before finally doing a Pluto/Charon flyby in July 2015. It may even attempt to include one or two encounters with Kuiper Belt objects beyond Pluto/Charon.

So for the next few years it will be silently flying at just over 16km per second, checking in now and then to say hi.

For more information on New Horizons go to: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/index.php

Here is an image taken of Io by New Horizons during the Jupiter flyby in 2007. It captures a volcanic eurption which you can just see on the top of the second image.