Archived: Interplanetary Journey Planner Set for Launch

After months of hard work behind the scenes, TfL Online are delighted to announce the upcoming launch of our latest digital innovation, with the new Interplanetary Journey Planner.

The new functionality will allow you to plan a point-to-point journey to any known location within the solar system, using public transport, walking, cycling or rocket options.

This will include journeys to many of the best known trans-Neptunian objects, including Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Salacia and Eris.

Plan your point-to-point journey to the red planet
To boldly go where no man has gone (using Journey Planner) before… You’ll soon be able to plan your point-to-point journey to Mars and beyond

With the distance between Earth and Neptune being around 2.8 billion miles, we’ve also added in some points of interest along the way for those looking to break the journey up.

These will include popular hotels and resorts within easy reach of the Martian canals, as well as key stops along the beautiful planetary rings of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and ice giants Uranus and Neptune.

As the Kuiper belt is further explored and more trans-Neptunian objects are confirmed, we’ll add them into the JP system along with any other new discoveries made beyond the Heliosphere.

The exact release date of the new functionality is yet to be confirmed, but we expect it to be sometime around stardate 41153.7. Future generations of TfL Online staff will update this blog when they have more information.

9 Comments

  1. Oh, I do so hope that TFL will include roadside kitsch, particularly the out of this world orange fibreglass Elephant with the inbuilt childrens slide, on the A44 between the Oort cloud and Aberystwyth

  2. Sadly I had to decline your kind offer of an interplanatory journey as my freedom pass seemed not to cover it. You also forgot to mention the implied condition that the journey be completed before noon 🙂 , which I found impractical due to lack of advance notice 🙁

    1. Ha! Good point Harry – you’re right, you might struggle to complete those kind of journeys by noon! 🚀

  3. Just to clarify, this post was of course an April Fools’ Day joke. Thanks to all who read the post and those who left comments – normal service will now be resuming on this blog.

    1. When you say “of course”, I don’t think anyone could have predicted even real-time London data would be available a few years ago, so.. we laugh now.. but you never know! 🙂 (Phil Schofield’s classic Going Live April Fool about what was, effectively an MP3 player years before iPods was highly prescient!).

      Back to the 2016 reality though, I’ve just got into playing with data and am amazed at the possibilities, but where can I go to inform of a problem or ask a question, as I’ve found a particular mismatch between API & Countdown info.

      Thanks,
      Drew

      1. I love your optimism Drew. You’re right, you never know but this kind of tech is probably quite a way off still!

        You can leave feedback or ask questions here or on any of our other blog posts (e.g. on one of our API posts if that’s more relevant) and I’ll make sure you get a response. We’d prefer this to be in the comments on the blog and visible to the public in case it’s useful info for others, but if you’d prefer you can also email us at [email protected]. Thanks.

  4. Thanks, Stephen. I would comment on a blogpost had I found one that looked relevant to the issue – and if I wasn’t so convinced it must be my misunderstanding of the APIs! I have emailed and am hoping someone sees today as the issue will disappear overnight. If I have happened to stumble across something worth noting, I’m sure it’s something you would want to tackle in docs/blog.

    Cheers,

    Drew

  5. I remember the good old days in Stardate 2016.3 when TfL took their finger out passing Uranus. I fondly look back at a time when Agile was a load of BS and systems engineers and programers never used the transit system and preferred to drive their McLarens. It took until 40000.0 to fix the poor user interface and looping results screens.

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