It's a long way from Baltimore to the outer edge of the solar system - 15 billion kilometres at least. But it is here that scientists and engineers hope to begin an unprecedented journey into the void of interstellar space. The Innovative Interstellar Explorer is the brainchild of Ralph McNutt of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who is proposing to send a craft into the region of space that lies beyond the solar system. Working with a group of mission scientists called Team-X at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, McNutt's team has come up with a design for a probe that could travel 200 times further than the sun in as little as 25 years.
A launch window will open up in 2014 when the powerful gravitational pull of Jupiter will give the IIE the extra oomph it needs to speed it on its way out of the ...
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