Three, two, one...
三、二、一...
The date was January 19, 2006; Cape Canaveral, Florida. A spacecraft the size of a grand piano left Earth on top of a rocket traveling 36,000 miles per hour.
日期是 2006 年 1 月 19 日；佛羅里達州卡納維爾角。一艘三角鋼琴大小的太空船乘在時速 36,000 英哩的火箭上離開地球。
This is New Horizons. It's a NASA probe and its mission is to complete our initial tour of the solar system by flying past Pluto and its moons.
這是「新視野號」。它是 NASA 的太空探測船，而它的任務是完成我們首次的太陽系之旅，藉由飛過冥王星及其衛星。
On board are seven scientific instruments, a generator fueled by decaying plutonium, and a few other things.
船上有七樣科學儀器、一個利用產生衰變的鈽原子發電的發電機，還有其他幾樣物品。
It has a container filled with the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh. That's the astronomer who discovered Pluto back in 1930. It has two American flags, two state quarters, from Florida and Maryland, a CD-Rom filled with the names of 400,000 people who signed up back in 2005, a CD-Rom with pictures of the New Horizons team, a piece of SpaceShipOne (that's the first privately owned spacecraft), and a US stamp from 1991 that says "Pluto: Not Yet Explored."
有一個裝滿克萊德‧湯博骨灰的罐子。那是在 1930 年發現冥王星的天文學家。有兩面美國國旗、兩枚 25 分州紀念幣，來自佛羅里達和馬里蘭、一張裝滿曾在 2005 年留下紀念的 40 萬人姓名的光碟(註一)、一張有著新視野號團隊合照的光碟、太空船一號的部件 (那是第一艘私人太空船) ，還有一張上頭寫著「冥王星：尚未探索」的 1991 年美國郵票。
So New Horizons has been flying for more than nine years now. And its date with Pluto has finally arrived.
新視野號如今已經飛行超過九年了。而它和冥王星的約會總算來臨。
To understand how big this is, you have to get that Pluto is really far away.
要了解這件事有多重大，你必須知道冥王星真的非常遠。
It's really, really far away—billions of miles away.
它真的、真的很遙遠－－距離好幾十億英哩。
So back in grade school when we modeled the solar system, it kind of looked like this. But actually, this is a huge lie.
所以回到小學我們在做太陽系模型時，那看起來有點像這樣。但事實上，那是個天大的謊。
Okay, so if Earth were the size of a basketball, Pluto would be the size of a golf ball. And at that same scale, the distance between them...
好的，所以假如地球是一顆籃球的大小，那冥王星就會是一顆高爾夫球的大小。相同的比例下，地球和冥王星間的距離...
Okay, tell me when to stop.
好的，告訴我什麼時候要停。
Keep going...keep going...okay, now go outside...get on a train.
繼續走...繼續走...好，現在去外面...搭上火車。
Wait, what?!
等等，什麼？!
The golf ball would be over 50 miles away.
那高爾夫球會在超過 50 英哩外。
Holy s***!
我的老天!
Yeah, and that is at its closet distance from us. And at the same scale, New Horizons, NASA's robot, would be a tiny fraction of the size of a grain of sand.
沒錯，而且那還是冥王星離我們最近的距離。照相同比例，新視野號，NASA 的機器人太空飛行器，會是一個沙粒大小的碎片。
And despite this immense distance, NASA's engineers have successfully guided New Horizons toward its target, and they're retrieving data back over radio waves...very slowly.
儘管這距離極大，NASA 的工程師成功地將新視野號導向它的目標，他們正透過無線電波接收回數據...速度極為緩慢。
The radio waves take four and a half hours to come all the way from New Horizons to us. NASA has to use 200-foot-wide antennas just to even detect the signal, and the download speed is one kilobit per second.
無線電波從新視野號一路傳回我們這要花上四個半小時。NASA 只為了偵測那訊號就得用上 200 英尺寬的天線，而那下載速度是每秒一千位元。
So one kilobit per second, how slow is that exactly?
一秒一千位元，那到底是多慢？
So if you had an image that's 1024 pixels wide, it would take about 40 minutes just to download it. That's 50 times slower than your dial-up modem from the '90s.
如果你有張 1024 像素寬的圖片，光下載它就會花上個 40 分鐘。那比你 90 年代用的數據機還要慢五十倍。
And one of the key pieces of data that New Horizons will be retrieving is good photos of Pluto.
新視野號會接收到的關鍵數據之一是冥王星的優質相片。
Right now we don't have any good photos of Pluto. The best things we have from the Hubble space telescope—it still looks like a blurry blob. But, New Horizons is gonna return historic, high-definition photos of Pluto. It already got some great shots of Jupiter when it flew by in 2007 to use the giant planet's gravity as a slingshot.
目前我們沒有任何冥王星的好照片。我們從哈伯望遠鏡拍到最出色的相片－－它看起來還是像模糊的一團東西。但是，新視野號將會傳回具歷史意義、高解析度的冥王星相片。它已經拍到一些木星的好照片，在 2007 年它從木星旁飛過好利用這巨大行星的重力當彈弓時。
So, right now, New Horizons is traveling at over 31,000 miles per hour, and it's pretty much used up all its fuel, so it can't slow down as it approaches the target. So all of these observations are gonna be happening really quickly. And after that?
所以，現在，新視野號正以時速超過 31,000 英哩航行，而它差不多用完燃料了，所以在它接近目標時，它無法減速。因此這所有觀測都會很快速地進行。那麼在那之後呢？
After that, New Horizons is just gonna keep going. And in 2019, engineers are gonna fly it past another small, icy object at the edge of the solar system to collect more data.
在那之後，新視野號就繼續前進。2019 年時，工程師會讓它飛過太陽系邊緣另一個小型、結滿冰的目標，去收集更多數據。
And as for Pluto, it'll continue on around the sun, taking 248 years to complete one revolution.
至於冥王星，它會繼續繞行太陽，花 248 年去完成一次公轉。
So that'd mean the entire history of the United States has unfolded in the time it's taken Pluto to orbit the sun once. The last time Pluto was in its current position, we didn't understand how species evolved or how germs transmitted diseases.
那代表美國整段歷史發展的時間，等同於冥王星繞行太陽一次所花的時間。上次冥王星在目前位置時，我們還不知道物種如何演化以及細菌如何傳播疾病。
Wow!
哇!
Aviation was still decades away, and spaceflight wouldn't happen for nearly 200 years. But this time around, when Pluto finishes its orbit, it's going to be met by a tiny robot sent by a curious species of apes living on a planet billions of miles away.
在當時，飛機還要過好幾十年才會出現，而太空飛行在將近兩百年內都不會發生。但這一次，當冥王星繞完運行的軌道時，它將會碰到一個小機器人太空飛行器，一個居住在幾十億英哩外星球上的奇特猿類種族發射出的飛行器。
註一：當初有一個活動，只要上網留下自己名字，在任務進行時，你的名字就可以一起送上冥王星喔！
- 「幾乎、差不多」- Pretty Much
So, right now, New Horizons is traveling at over 31,000 miles per hour, and it's pretty much used up all its fuel...
所以，現在，新視野號正以時速超過 31,000 英哩航行，而它差不多用完燃料了... - 「用完、耗盡」- Use Up
So, right now, New Horizons is traveling at over 31,000 miles per hour, and it's pretty much used up all its fuel...
所以，現在，新視野號正以時速超過 31,000 英哩航行，而它差不多用完燃料了... - 「至於」- As For
And as for Pluto, it'll continue on around the sun, taking 248 years to complete one revolution.
至於冥王星，它會繼續繞行太陽，花 248 年去完成一次公轉。
