by Alan Stern
OUTBOUND AND PREGNANT
After the afternoon science panel adjourned, most people went out for quick, early dinners and then returned to the Kossiakoff Center for the critical “phone home” spacecraft check-in moment later that evening. NASA televised the event, just like the flyby countdown that morning.
At Kossiakoff that evening, the press, the VIPs, the NASA brass, and guests all gathered to watch in the main auditorium. More than another thousand people were in the overflow areas. Giant screens showed the Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman and her team in the MOC attending their consoles, waiting for the crucial signal to come down at the speed of light from Pluto, by way of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Alan, his assistant Cindy Conrad, Glen Fountain, NASA Planetary Exploration Director Jim Green, Green’s boss John Grunsfeld, and NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden were just outside the MOC in the neighboring conference room, looking in through a glass wall and discussing the mission’s significance.
A larger-than-life image of Alice was displayed on the Kossiakoff’s jumbo monitor, scanning her array of computer consoles, waiting and listening intently to her headset. The moment approached when New Horizons would either make contact or leave a deafening, conspicuous silence. Then, within seconds of the scheduled time of 9:02 P.M., displays on the MOC’s big board computer display began to show data about to flow in.
The big-board MOC display screen began to fill with numbers and telemetry messages, all colored green—no red anywhere! In the room adjacent to the MOC where he watched, Alan told NASA Administrator Bolden, “Look, look at that—New Horizons is healthy. The encounter succeeded!”
Alice in a clear, matter-of-fact voice, reported the unfolding events for the world:
“Okay, we are in lock with carrier [signal]. Stand by for telemetry. In lock on symbols.… Okay, copy that. We are in lock with telemetry with the spacecraft.”
Applause rang out among Alice’s colleagues in the MOC. In the conference room next door, the television showed handshakes and high fives and hugs between Alan, the NASA Administrator, and others. New Horizons had survived the close approach to Pluto!
The applause quickly spread, along with loud, exuberant “woohoos” across the Kossiakoff auditorium and its overflow rooms.
Next, the voices of the various MOC engineering console operators were heard reporting to Alice, followed by her acknowledgment:
“MOM, this is RF on Pluto One.”
“Go ahead RF.”
“RF is reporting nominal carrier power, nominal signal-to-noise ratio for the telemetry. RF nominal.”
“Copy that RF nominal.”
“MOM, this is Autonomy on Pluto One.”
“Go ahead, Autonomy.”
“Autonomy is very happy to report nominal status. No rules have fired.”
Here there was a smattering of applause, from those who understood its meaning: New Horizons had encountered no problems requiring it to undertake any kind of emergency response. Again, the applause spread outward to the crowds watching the projected video, who picked up on the engineer’s glee at what must be very good news.
“C&DH.”
“Go ahead, C&DH.”
“C&DH reports nominal status, our SSR pointers are where we expect them to be, which means we recorded the expected amount of data.”
“Copy that; looks like we have a good data report!”
As Alice said these last words, her voice swelled and she could be seen breaking into a wide smile. New Horizons was reporting that the amount of data in its solid-state recorder was just what it should be if it had made every one of its intended Pluto system observations. Still more applause: everything had worked!
Over the next minute or so, the rest of the subsystem teams came in with the remaining reports of nominal performance during the flyby. Alice concluded with a summary report to Alan on the communications loop: “PI, this is MOM on Pluto One. We have a healthy spacecraft. We’ve recorded data at the Pluto system, and we’re outbound from Pluto.”
At the very instant Alice finished speaking, the door flew open from the glass-walled conference room next door to the MOC. Alan breezed into the control room, grinning and beaming, arms raised high, pumping his fists. He went directly to Alice and they hugged.
The crowd in the MOC and in the Kossiakoff Center went wild with a sustained standing ovation. Alan whispered into Alice’s ear something no one could hear: “We did it, we did it!” He fought back tears. “Flying across the solar system and exploring Pluto with you has been the honor of a lifetime.”
Still on screen, Alan could be seen turning to shake hands and slap backs with Chris Hersman and others around the MOC as the elated applause continued. One of the announcers mumbled into a hot microphone, “Boy, I’m gonna lose it.” Alice could be heard saying, “Sorry. I can’t express how I feel. I’m shaking. Just like we planned it. Just like we practiced. I mean … we did it!” And then she giggled.
Minutes later, Alice, Alan, and all the others in the MOC left to travel across the APL campus to the Kossiakoff Center. On his way, Alan tweeted, “Don’t know about you, but I had a pretty good day today. #PlutoFlyby”
As they arrived at Kossiakoff around 9:20 P.M., the MC asked the crowd to welcome the New Horizons team. Everyone there turned toward the top of the auditorium, craning their necks to see, and in came Alan, followed by the NASA administrator and John Grunsfeld, the head of all NASA science missions, followed in turn by Glen Fountain and then a long line with dozens of team members from the MOC, the engineering team, and the science team, all in their New Horizons mission shirts, walking down to the auditorium floor in single file.
As each team member entered and headed down the aisle, they high-fived bystanders and then Alan and Alice and Glen, who had gathered to welcome them to the floor at the front of the auditorium. The crowd responded with a standing ovation for three solid minutes as the team filed in: they had become space rock stars.
At the podium, NASA administrator Charlie Bolden announced, “We have now visited all the planets of the solar system!” And the audience responded with a “Pluto salute,” hundreds of people holding nine fingers in the air.
At the same time, three billion miles away, New Horizons was outbound from Pluto, but still gathering important data. Its recorders were now pregnant with the prize so many had worked so long for—a scientific treasure trove of data that would revolutionize knowledge about Pluto, its moons, and the nature of all the small planets in the Kuiper Belt.
A BONFIRE IN MARYLAND
New Horizons was speeding away from Pluto, but its work was far from finished. Just about the time NASA Administrator Bolden was addressing the crowd at APL, New Horizons was turning to take images of Pluto’s backlit orb to search for atmospheric hazes. There were many more science observations to come that night and in the coming days, but most important to the press and public was the knowledge that by morning there would be first-look images from the closest approach. And with that transmission and the new data it would bring, tomorrow would be another long workday for the New Horizons team, and it would begin startlingly early.
But no matter! The New Horizons team knew that their flyby was in the bag. So there in Maryland, it was their time to party. After escaping the crowds at APL, the team, with family and friends gathered back at the long-familiar nearby Sheraton, where most of the out-of-town team was staying, and headed directly to “Ten Forward,” their private conference room and makeshift party suite.
The party was already well under way when Alan, who had been held up with media interviews at Kossiakoff, entered to a standing ovation. That recognition by his team, family, and colleagues was sweeter than any other he remembers.
At some point during the ensuing party, Alan and a dozen others ended up down by the hotel’s swimming pool to reenact a scene from their Florida launch party nearly ten years before, in which the ULA rocket team had conducted a ritual bonfire burning of the launch malfunction proce
dures. Alan:
I remembered that great, celebratory rocket-science ritual back at the launch party. So just before the flyby, I reminded some of the team about it and said, “If everything works, let’s do that again: Let’s go outside after we get back, and build a bonfire in a trash can out by the swimming pool and burn our plans for responding to flyby anomalies.
So—fueled by a good amount of alcohol—we went down by the pool and built a fire, and threw those now-useless anomaly-procedure documents into it, laughing and savoring the moment.
“SOMETHING WONDERFUL”
The next morning, just as scheduled, the first of the truly high-resolution images of various locales on Pluto were received on Earth. Alan:
Those first high-resolution images proved to be scientific gold, even beyond our expectations. I was bowled over by the complexity of the scenes—so much was going on in each and every patch of Pluto’s surface. When I saw that, I remember thinking that everything we’d done to get there, all the career and personal sacrifices, were suddenly vindicated, the whole freaking twenty-six-plus years had been worth it.
And with those images, Alan knew they had something worthy of that New York Times cover page that they’d waited so long to grace, and, indeed, the next morning’s Times featured New Horizons on the cover, above the fold with giant headlines. Almost five hundred other newspapers around the world did the same that day. The Pluto flyby was everywhere in the news.
As July 15 continued to unfold, another high-resolution image, equally stunning, and then another, and another, assembled on the science team’s computers. One showed the surface of the western part of Pluto’s vast heart—a region larger than the state of Texas. It showed an intricate and strangely organized geological pattern that left the normally loquacious New Horizons geologists at a loss for words. The scene contained smooth, bright areas, separated by narrow channels or ridges, which were vaguely polygonal, suggesting slow-motion convection cells, like the pattern seen on the surface of a heated, churning liquid. But how could that be, in this cold, cold place whose surface temperature was 400 degrees Fahrenheit below 0? Perhaps instead it was some sort of “polygonal cracking” like geologists see in ice-laden regions on Earth or Mars, where repeated freezing and thawing have led to regular patterns of cracks in mud or ice. Whatever it was, it appeared there was something amazing happening there. Something was moving and changing and flowing on the surface over time. Alan:
I remember thinking, “This little planet is truly a spectacular place.” It rivals or beats many of the larger planets in geological complexity. Before the flyby, I could not in my wildest dreams have pictured structures like these or imagined how strong Pluto’s geological personality would turn out to be. It was just astounding.
At a NASA press conference broadcast later that day, a panel of New Horizons scientists spoke in front of another packed Kossiakoff auditorium and a massive online NASA TV and internet audience. Alan kicked things off with a tongue-in-cheek understatement that echoed his tweet the night before: “Well, I had a pretty good day yesterday. How about you?” Then he described how New Horizons was now already more than a million miles on the other side of Pluto, and that it was beginning to send us the first of the many treasures it would be returning to Earth over the next sixteen months.
Mission scientist Hal Weaver presented images showing surface details of Pluto’s small, outermost moon, Hydra, revealing its size and shape for the first time. Those images showed that Hydra was elongated, and somewhat potato-shaped, but with axes twenty-eight by nineteen miles across. Hal then described their discovery that Hydra’s reflectivity was very high, like freshly driven snow, suggesting that its surface is likely composed of water ice.
Next, New Horizons Composition science theme team leader Will Grundy reported on the first preliminary composition maps of Pluto, which showed strong variations in methane ice abundance across different geological regions. Will also reported that it was already clear that his team was seeing even more stunning diversity in composition, with different molecular ices—nitrogen, methane, and others—varying in abundance across different places on Pluto.
Deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin smiled as she showed off a stunningly beautiful new image of the close-approach hemisphere of Charon. “I thought Charon might only show ancient terrain covered in craters. Many on the team thought that might be the case. But Charon just blew our socks off when we got this new image today.” She then led the audience through a brief tour of that newly revealed world, one “with deep canyons, troughs, cliffs, and dark regions that are still mysterious to us. We’ve been saying that Pluto did not disappoint. I can add that Charon did not disappoint us either.”
Next, John Spencer made a carefully crafted announcement on behalf of the entire team: “We now have a name for Pluto’s heart: We want it to honor the discoverer of Pluto, so we are calling it Tombaugh Regio.” With that, the audience broke into applause, and the NASA camera cut to Annette and Alden Tombaugh, Clyde’s retirement-age children, front and center in the audience. They were beaming. Then Alan added, “We could see Pluto’s heart from very far away. When we were still 70 million miles out and only barely resolving the planet, we could see it shining like a beacon. Because it’s the most prominent feature on the planet, we’re going to name it in Clyde Tombaugh’s honor.”
Then it was time for John Spencer to reveal the pièce de résistance—the first very high-resolution images that science team members had gawked at when they first appeared on John’s laptop a few hours before. It revealed the southwest corner of Tombaugh Regio, where Pluto’s heart abuts the adjoining darker mountains of Cthulhu. The image showed steep and starkly shadowed mountains 3 billion miles from Earth. As the audience gasped and then cheered, John quipped, “That was our reaction, too!”
John then explained how the team could deduce the heights of mountains from the length of the shadows they cast. “These mountains here that we’re seeing are spectacular … up to 11,000 feet high. They look to be tens of miles wide. So these are pretty substantial mountains. They stand up against the Rocky Mountains and other significant ranges here on Earth.”
The implications of such high, sharp, and fresh-looking mountains for the nature of Pluto were profound. Scientists had long known there was a lot of nitrogen and methane on Pluto’s surface, but that mountains could not be made out of those substances, because solid nitrogen and methane are simply not strong enough materials to support such steep relief, even in Pluto’s low gravity. As a result, nitrogen or methane mountains would slump down under their own weight. No, these mountains had to be made out of something stronger—most likely water ice, which is the most common surface material on the satellites and other worlds of the outer solar system. These landforms implied that giant blocks of the water-ice “bedrock” from Pluto’s crust had somehow been displaced and forced upward into dramatic mountain ranges. Next John showed a close-up of Tombaugh Regio.
This scene is about 150 miles across. We see features as small as half a mile here, so you could see the APL campus on this image. The most striking thing geologically is that we haven’t found an impact crater on this image. That means this is a young surface. Just eyeballing it, we think it has to be probably less than 100 million years old, which is a tiny fraction of the 4.5-billion-year age of the solar system. I never would have believed that the first close-up picture we got of Pluto would not have a single impact crater on it. This is astonishing.
The big question was: What is causing all the geological and tectonic activity they’d discovered? Why the lack of craters in some areas, the wide variety of textures and compositions, and the huge mountain ranges?
They were all telling the same story—that while Pluto itself is ancient, its surface is young and active. New Horizons was revealing that Pluto is capable of supporting active geology more than 4 billion years after its formation. But how? Textbook geophysical theory predicted that a small planet like Pluto should have long ago cooled o
ff and ceased making new surface geology. But the data was irrefutable. Pluto, it seems, hadn’t read the textbooks.
As the press conference neared its end, Chip Reid from CBS News directed a question at Alan: “I interviewed you years before the flyby, and the only prediction you would make is that we would see something wonderful. Have your expectations been met?”
With a smirk, Alan responded, “I’ll give you a technical answer: Ya think?”
GOING VIRAL
New Horizons attracted an unusually high level of media and public attention before the flyby. But when the world finally saw the stunning quality of the images and the beautiful and photogenic nature of the planet they revealed—with its dramatic topography, strange surfaces, and, of course, its bright heart—that attention multiplied to levels NASA had never seen. The worldwide reaction in the wake of the flyby was instantaneous and simply unprecedented.
On the morning of July 16, fifty years to the very day after the first pictures from the first flyby of Mars dominated the front page of The New York Times in 1965, the paper ran a huge New Horizons image, on the front page above the fold. Giant images of Pluto were projected to crowds at Times Square. The internet went wild for New Horizons as well, with Google even doing a special animated Pluto “doodle” on their home page, in which the second O was replaced with a stylized spinning Pluto (embossed, naturally, with a heart) and a little cartoon of New Horizons arcing across the frame.