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New Horizons rockets to PlutoJourney to planet will take almost 10 years
 New Horizons lifts off Thursday afternoon atop an Atlas V rocket bound for Pluto. RELATED
MISSION TO PLUTOSource: AP/NASA  This is the frontier of planetary science. -- New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- NASA's New Horizons spacecraft roared into space Thursday afternoon bound for the planet Pluto. The spacecraft is the fastest ever launched, according to NASA. New Horizons lifted off atop a Lockheed Martin Atlas V rocket at 2 p.m. ET from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to begin a 10-year, 3 billion-mile mission. "New Horizons spacecraft is on its way to the very edge of our solar system," said Atlas control. (Watch the rocket launch -- 4:05) Thursday's launch comes after two scrubbed attempts earlier this week -- one because of weather, the other because of a power outage. NASA had until February 14 to launch the probe. About 43 minutes into the mission, the spacecraft separated successfully from the rocket's third stage -- mission controllers cheered the news. New Horizons will reach a speed of about 47,000 mph (75,600 kph), more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet. According to The Physics Factbook, a bullet from a large-caliber rifle travels at about 1,500 meters or 5,000 (1,500 meters) feet per second -- about 3,400 mph (5,400 kph). It took Apollo 11 three days to reach the moon in 1969. New Horizons will fly by it in about nine hours and reach Jupiter in a little more than a year, the space agency said. If all goes as planned, it will then execute a "gravity assist" maneuver, slingshotting around Jupiter to pick up speed. The maneuver will increase New Horizons' speed to 21 kilometers per second -- 47,000 mph, NASA said. From there it will travel nine more years in more or less a straight line to Pluto. The probe, about the size of a baby grand piano, will capture the first up-close imagery of Pluto, its moons and a region of the outer solar system called the Kuiper Belt. The 10 years it will take New Horizons to reach Pluto will be a long wait for the scientists and engineers who have designed the mission, but they say the payoff will be worth it. (Watch and learn about NASA's mission to Pluto -- 1:28) "The New Horizons mission is going somewhere no mission has gone before," project scientist Hal Weaver said. "This is the frontier of planetary science." The Kuiper Belt is a region of icy, rocky bodies that populate a part of the solar system beyond the planet Neptune. "It is fantastically interesting to me to have a chance maybe within my lifetime for scientists to see up-close what those objects look like and to begin our reconnaissance of that region of space," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said Tuesday morning. Scientists think the bodies are debris left over from the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago. Researchers theorized for decades that such an area probably existed in the solar system, but the first Kuiper Belt object was not identified until 1992. Since then, hundreds have been found, some of them quite large. Planetary astronomers now believe Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object. "It's the capstone of the initial reconnaissance of the planets," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said. "It's something that will go down in history, not just for the way it changes textbooks but for the sort of society we are, that we do these things of lasting historic importance, that we explore beyond our own world." Weaver added: "This is one of the most important regions of the solar system. It hasn't been explored yet, and New Horizons is going to be the first mission to go out there and look at it up close and personal." Plutonium to indirectly power craftWith the spacecraft containing 24 pounds of radioactive plutonium-238, the New Horizons launch is somewhat controversial. The craft is not directly nuclear-powered, but the decay of the plutonium generates heat to fuel a battery, which in turn will power the probe as it moves far away from the sun to the outer reaches of the solar system. Critics have expressed concern that an accident on launch could have spread deadly plutonium over a wide swath of central Florida. (Full story) In an environmental impact statement NASA was required to file before making final flight plans, the space agency indicated that a 1-in-620 chance existed of an accident on liftoff that would release plutonium into the environment. As a worst-case scenario, NASA estimated the chances at "1-in-1.4 million to 1-in-18 million" that an "extremely unlikely launch area accident" could release up to 2 percent, or about half a pound, of the plutonium on board the spacecraft. NASA critic Karl Grossman, author of "The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet," said he doesn't agree with NASA's interpretation of the risks. "Is NASA again crossing its fingers and hoping?" he asked. "If it's 2 percent or it's 6 percent or if it's 20 percent or if it's 100 percent, when you're talking about plutonium, you're talking about the most toxic radioactive substance known." New Horizons scientists say the benefits of the project outweigh the risks associated with launch. "In order for us to continue our exploration of the universe, we have to do these kinds of things," Weaver said. "The exploration of space, the detailed study of the planets, including Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, are going to be some of the things that people look back on as the achievements of our civilization." Stern added, "I wouldn't be bringing my friends and family, my children if I thought they were at serious risk." CNN's Kate Tobin contributed to this report. 
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