Your regular commercial airliner, like a Boeing 747 is fast. A super-spy jet like the SR-71 Blackbird is much faster than that, traveling at over three times the speed of sound. So how does a deep-space probe like New Horizons, which recently flew past Pluto, compare? Thanks to this animation, you can see it’s very, very fast indeed. To put 36,000 mph in perspective, at that speed, you’d be able to fly from San Francisco to New York in about five minutes. Of course, you’d also be turned into a ball of searing hot plasma.
|
