Pluto 1930-2006 Never Forget Shirt

 

I actually misspoke. It was ~33 years to reach the Pluto 1930-2006 Never Forget Shirt heliopause. And that was using a path designed to maximize the number of objects visited, not for speed. New Horizons is traveling faster than either Voyager craft and expected to reach heliopause in the mid-2030s. FYI the 9th planet is theorized to be well beyond the heliopause, which is the boundary you're referring to, out in what is essentially interstellar space. Something like 3 to 4 times the total distance. Just because the solar wind is no longer flowing outward doesn't mean that an object can't be gravitationally bound beyond that point. The voyager missions also had different objectives. They were sightseeing on their way out. If we really wanted something to move out into the Oort cloud asap, it wouldn't be taking a tour of several planets before leaving. At most, it would use one or two planets to slingshot itself at pretty fast speeds. I mean planet 9s orbit is hypothesized to be around 400 to 800 au from the sun while voyager 1 is around 150 au from the sun. So a probe will take a longer time to get to planet9. The voyagers reached heliopause which is the point where solar winds and the interstellar medium reach a balanced pressure. At a greater distance from the heliopause, you’ll have other solar system objects in orbit around the sun such as the port cloud objects. But then again, Uranus and Neptune have only been visited once by one of the voyagers and all we know about them is from telescope observations and the one mission. Even though there are proposed plans for the ice giants, I think we should go back and study them. That's more of a theory for interstellar travel and doesn't hold up in our own solar system. When you're talking about trips that will take hundreds or thousands of years a small improvement in technology could knock years off a mission, but anything in our own solar system is much closer and probably wouldn't take more than about 30 years.

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