NASA spacecraft traverses Neptune's orbit

From NASA Reports
NASA spacecraft traverses Neptune's orbit
A NASA spacecraft headed for Pluto crossed Neptune's orbit on Aug. 25.

    The piano-sized spacecraft known as New Horizons, which launched in January 2006, reached Neptune’s orbit -- nearly 2.75 billion miles from Earth -- in a record eight years and eight months, according to NASA. This was its last major crossing en route to becoming the first probe to make a close encounter with Pluto, expected on July 14, 2015.
    The most recent milestone fell upon the 25th anniversary of the historic encounter of NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft with Neptune on Aug. 25, 1989.
    New Horizons was scheduled to cross the giant planet’s orbit at 10:04 p.m. EDT on Aug. 25.
    Several senior members of the New Horizons science team were young members of Voyager’s science team in 1989. Many remember how Voyager 2’s images of Neptune and its planet-sized moon Triton fueled anticipation of the discoveries to come. They share a similar, growing excitement as New Horizons begins its approach to Pluto.
    Voyager’s visit to the Neptune system revealed previously unseen features of Neptune itself, such as the Great Dark Spot, a massive storm similar to, but not as long-lived, as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Voyager also, for the first time, captured clear images of the ice giant’s ring system, too faint to be clearly viewed from Earth.
    Many researchers feel the 1989 Neptune flyby -- Voyager’s final planetary encounter -- might have offered a preview of what’s to come next summer. Scientists suggest that Triton, with its icy surface, bright poles and varied terrain, is a Pluto-like object that Neptune pulled into orbit. Scientists recently restored Voyager’s footage of Triton and used it to construct the best global color map yet of that strange moon  -- further whetting appetites for a Pluto close-up. 
    Similar to Voyager 1 and 2's historic observations, New Horizons also is on a path toward potential discoveries in the Kuiper Belt, a disc-shaped region of icy objects past the orbit of Neptune, and other unexplored realms of the outer solar system and beyond.
    Voyager 1 and 2 were launched 16 days apart in 1977, and one of the spacecraft visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 now is the most distant human-made object, about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away from the sun. In 2012, it became the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. Voyager 2, the longest continuously operated spacecraft, is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from our sun.   

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