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This gives Pluto an escape velocity of 4,363.2 km per hour / 2,711.167 miles per hour (as compared to Earth's 40,270 km per hour / 25,020 miles per hour). Pluto is more than twice the diameter and a dozen times the mass of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt.
Their elliptical orbit is eccentric, so that the distance between A and B varies from 35.6 astronomical units (AU), or about the distance between Pluto and the Sun, to 11.2 AU, or about the distance between Saturn and the Sun. One astronomical unit is the distance from Earth to the Sun, 150 million kilometers.
The horizontal axis is time, but is calibrated in miles. It can be seen that the measured range is 238,000 mi (383,000 km), approximately the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The distance to the moon was directly measured by means of radar first in 1946 as part of Project Diana. [48]
The distance between Charon and Pluto is about 12,200 miles (19,640 km), compared to the 238,855 miles (384,400 km) on average separating Earth from its moon.
At Pluto's distance, radio signals from the space probe back to Earth took four hours and 25 minutes to traverse 4.7 billion km of space. [ 68 ] Part of the reason for the delay between the gathering of and transmission of data is that all of the New Horizons instrumentation is body-mounted.
Pluto's reign. For decades, students learned the phrase "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" to remember the order of the planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars ...
This number is likely much higher, due to the sheer number of stars needed to be surveyed; a star approaching the Solar System 10 million years ago, moving at a typical Sun-relative 20–200 kilometers per second, would be 600–6,000 light-years from the Sun at present day, with millions of stars closer to the Sun.
Photographs of Pluto taken on 14 July 2015 taken 15 minutes after New Horizon 's closest approach, from a distance of 18,000 kilometers and sent to Earth on 13 September 2015 show a near-sunset on Pluto with details of the surface and a haze in the atmosphere.