One thing that helps me fight the depression that reading the daily news engenders is finding examples of achievements that highlight how great man can be. (As opposed to the barbarism he can so casually display by inflicting suffering and death on strangers.)

My most recent enthusiasm comes at the skill man has displayed in mastering the laws of physics to such a degree that we can build machines to learn about other places in our solar system.

Here’s a portion of an article on Nov. 13 in Discovery News by Ian O’Neill

“Before July, we only had a very vague and very fuzzy idea about what Pluto would look like up-close. Now, since the NASA New Horizons flyby, we’re becoming intimately familiar with the tiny, complex world’s icy plains, mountains, chemical composition and tenuous, yet intricate, atmosphere.

With all this diversity on Pluto, it can be hard for planetary scientists to discern the different types of surface features for scientific study, so they have produced what, at first, looks like an iconic Andy Warhol creation. They’ve created a psychedelic Pluto, blotted with highly contrasting colors.

Although science often imitates art, this interpretation of Pluto’s famous hemisphere holds critical scientific purpose. The technique is known as ‘principal component analysis’ and it is used to see slight changes in surface composition. The observation was captured with New Horizons’ Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 as the spacecraft was nearing closest approach of the dwarf planet — at a range of 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers).”

This learning comes after New Horizons traveled 3 billion miles at approximately 31,000 miles per hour (currently) and then hit a target just 200 miles across. Because of orbital mechanics, if it had been 100 seconds off course, it would not be able to gather 100 percent of the desired scientific data. Think about that: 100 seconds off course from a travel time of 9.5 years. Now that’s precision. (David W. Brown in Mentalfloss.com)

Those numbers are impressive. And then I come across this:

"Astronomers have spotted what they believe to be the most distant object ever seen in our solar system. The dwarf planet, known for now simply as V774104, is more than 100 times farther from the sun than we are. Astronomers aren't sure what it's doing out there, but they're hoping follow-up studies of its orbit will teach them more. V774104 was first noticed in mid-October. Astronomer Scott Sheppard and his colleagues were using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to hunt for faint, distant objects orbiting the sun. Basically they were just pointing the building-sized telescope at random patches of sky to try to catch anything moving out there."

The numbers are hard to fathom. The dwarf is 100 times farther from the sun than Earth. We are 93 million miles away so the dwarf is 9,300,000,000 miles from the sun. If I jumped into a Honda Civic and forced its poor little fusion-powered four-cylinder engine to go 100 mph, it would take 93,000,000 hours to get there (no pee breaks and no fuel stops) or 3,875,000 days or 10,616+ years. That's a hell of a ride.