His next question is: Could you tell me more about the guidance system on the spacecraft,
as there is a big possibility that it could collide with a Kuiper Belt object; and how much time will a signal take to reach the spacecraft?
Also, how are the scientists going to guide it through the Kuiper Belt?
Okay. Well, let's start with the time it takes for the signal to reach the Earth or the spacecraft, vice versa.
When we're at Pluto, it takes a radio signal four-and-a-half hours to get to the Earth and back again,
so once we send a command to the spacecraft from the Earth, it will be nine hours before we get a response from the spacecraft
knowing that that command was taken and has been executed. It's kind of a long time to wait,
but that's what you have to do when you're dealing with distances this great.
As far as guiding the spacecraft through the Kuiper Belt, it's true that there are many,
many thousands, hundreds of thousands of Kuiper-Belt objects. We don't even know all of them yet,
but space is so large that the chances of hitting an object as we go through there are really very small.
And you have to remember that before we get to the Kuiper Belt,
we'll also be traveling through the Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Jupiter which also has many hundreds of thousands of objects in it.
But, again, because space is so large, the chances of hitting something are really very small.
But you can be sure that if we realize ahead of time that a collision might occur, might be imminent, we're going to take action to avoid that.
That's good to hear.