ASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto to capture never-before-seen images at close range. The unmanned vehicle took nearly a decade to travel 3 billion miles from Earth to the dwarf planet. The New Horizons is a spacecraft that its purpose was to get to pluto and jupiter./2015

The Cassini spacecraft is about to get an icy shower as it orbits Saturn. Cassini will storm through a jet of water vapor and frozen particles erupting from the south pole of Enceladus, one of Saturn's many moons. The spacecraft will zoom within 30 miles (50 kilometers) of the pole, providing the best sampling yet of its underground ocean.
It will be traveling at 19,000 mph, enough to penetrate the plume. scientist are doing this because there might be life on …show more content…
Daedalus was to be a two-stage spacecraft. The first stage would operate for two years, taking the spacecraft to 7.1% of light speed (0.071 c), and then after it was jettisoned, the second stage would fire for 1.8 years, taking the spacecraft up to about 12% of light speed (0.12 c), before being shut down for a 46-year cruise period. Due to the extreme temperature range of operation required, from near absolute zero to 1600 K, the engine bells and support structure would be made of molybdenum alloyed with Titanium, Zirconium and Carbon, which retains strength even at cryogenic temperatures. This velocity is well beyond the capabilities of chemical rockets or even the type of nuclear pulse propulsion studied during Project Orion. Controlled-fusion engine and the nuclear–electric systems have very low thrust, equipment to convert nuclear energy into electrical has a large mass, which results in small acceleration, which would take a century to achieve the desired speed; thermodynamic nuclear engines of the NERVA require a great quantity of fuel, photon rockets have to generate power at a rate of 3×109 W per kg of vehicle mass and require mirrors with absorptivity of less than 1 part in 106, interstellar ramjet problems are tenuous interstellar medium with a density of about 1 atom/cm3, a large diameter funnel, and high power required for its electric field. Thus the only suitable propulsion method for the project was the nuclear pulse