When the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in July of 2015 after a nine-and-a-half-year journey from Earth, it was traveling so fast — roughly 32,000 miles per hour — that it had less than 30 minutes to photograph the entire dwarf planet, and the images it sent back revealed a heart-shaped nitrogen ice sheet the size of Texas

At approximately 7:49 in the morning Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, 14 July 2015 — approximately nine years, five months, and twenty-five days after departing Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V 551 rocket at the fastest launch speed ever recorded for any human-manufactured object (a specific 36,373 miles per hour that the January 2006 launch [...] The post When the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in July of 2015 after a nine-and-a-half-year journey from Earth, it was traveling so fast —