Question

sunlight takes about 8.4 minutes to travel from the sun to earth. when nasa's new horizons spacecraft passed pluto in 2015, it was about 32 au from earth. about how long did it take for transmitted images of pluto to travel from the spacecraft to earth? sunlight takes about 8.4 minutes to travel from the sun to earth. when nasa's new horizons spacecraft passed pluto in 2015, it was about 32 au from earth. about how long did it take for transmitted images of pluto to travel from the spacecraft to earth? one plutonian year they arrived almost instantaneously. 3 weeks 4-1/2 hours 2-1/4 days

Answer 1

We are given:

* Sunlight takes 8.4 minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth (1 AU is the average distance from the Sun to Earth, about 93 million miles)

* NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed Pluto in 2015, when it was 32 AU from Earth

We are asked to determine how long it took for images transmitted from New Horizons to travel from the spacecraft to Earth.

To solve this, we note that light (and radio signals) travel at approximately 300,000 km/s in a vacuum. So, for each 1 AU distance, it takes about 8.3 minutes for light to travel.

Since New Horizons was 32 AU from Earth when it passed Pluto, it would then take:

32 AU * (8.3 minutes/1 AU) = 266 minutes

Which is equal to 4.4 hours.

Therefore, the answer is *4-1/2 hours*

The step-by-step working is:

* Light travels at 300,000 km/s

* It takes 8.3 minutes for light to travel 1 AU

* New Horizons was 32 AU from Earth when passing Pluto

* So it would take 32 AU * 8.3 minutes/AU = 266 minutes

* 266 minutes is equal to 4.4 hours

Hope this explanation helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.