by Alan Stern
NASA had experienced large online reactions before, logging more than 100 million hits for Mars landings, but it had never seen anything like this. The day of the flyby was NASA’s biggest day ever on social media and websites, receiving over 1 billion hits. New Horizons rocked Facebook and Twitter and trended at the top of Instagram for days. Scores of memes, many riffing on the heart motif, were created and bounced around the internet. The soaring media reaction even spurred its own metareaction, with dozens of stories written about the level of attention that had been generated.
The ubiquity of New Horizons and Pluto on the web, and the number of people sharing in New Horizons events around the globe, gave this flyby an entirely new kind of feel. The world had changed since Voyager, with so many new forms of communication and participation. Thanks to that, the New Horizons mission felt in many ways like the first truly twenty-first-century planetary encounter.
Consider: with Voyager, to participate fully you had to be in just the right place—specifically, at JPL—at just the right time—on flyby day. For New Horizons you didn’t need to be there; the flyby was everywhere simultaneously. The events at APL, the imagery from Pluto—everything that reached Earth—went onto the internet “for all mankind,” as it were.
Yes, it was undeniably cool for those able to be present at APL, the crowd of enthusiastic space nerds, the mission team, the press circus, the politicians, and the celebrities. But even the people at APL were themselves actually spending a lot of time online, looking at and participating via the internet and social media, sharing images, information, and impressions in real time with a worldwide community that was seeing it all, and chiming in, as it happened. Even though the flyby was taking place 3 billion miles away, it felt in some ways as though people were able to cheat both the speed of light and the expansive scope of the Earth. It felt as if the global mass of humanity was all there together.
The word “together” here is important. It’s not just that everyone was receiving a broadcast at once. The sense of participation and communication, with people from all over contributing to the conversation via social media was very real, and unlike anything seen in the first flybys of all the closer planets back in the twentieth century. With New Horizons, humankind was able to directly share the flyby and the very human events around it, just as it all happened, transforming it into a communal, worldwide experience.
EVEREST, SUMMITED
Following a theme of honoring the explorers who came before them, the New Horizons team gave two ranges of soaring water-ice mountains along the western side of Tombaugh Regio the names Norgay and Hillary Montes, after Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, the first explorers to reach the top of Everest, Earth’s highest peak.
This association between those who summited Everest and those who summited Pluto was particularly apt. Alan had been referring to Pluto as the “Everest of the Solar System” since the 1990s—meaning that it was the last, the farthest, the coldest, and the hardest peak of planetary exploration.
But what Alan didn’t anticipate, or realize until the actual flyby and its immediate aftermath, was how, when the moment came, he would feel like he imagined those earlier explorers must have felt upon summiting Everest itself. Alan:
When I think back to the few days following the flyby, it really felt like we’d all had a peak experience in our lives. We’d reached and then summited our own metaphorical mountain, Pluto.
And you know, more than anything, it took an amazing team of people that worked together for a very long time to achieve this—something vastly larger than any of us could have accomplished individually. Across our team during the flyby there was very much a feeling of being part of a band of humans out exploring, accomplishing something extraordinarily special. So many of us said to one another that week what a privilege it had been to help make the flyby happen and to be able to inspire others perhaps to one day do even greater things in space exploration.
Twenty-six years had elapsed between that first fateful meeting to discuss the idea of going to Pluto with NASA in May of 1989, and that summer in 2015 when the exploration of Pluto was accomplished. People who were not even born when it started were moved by it in ways that no one had imagined when the quest began.
History was made. New knowledge was created. A nation was reminded it can achieve greatness. And a world was reminded that we humans, we Earthlings—really can accomplish amazing things.
17
ONWARD NEW HORIZONS
LOOKING BACK FROM THE FAR SIDE OF PLUTO
For most humans, vision is the most impactful of all our senses, and of all the valuable data returned by spacecraft, it is the images that move us the most. Among all the mind-blowing images of the Pluto system taken by New Horizons, we of course have our own favorites. Many are color images made by the Ralph instrument, but others are black-and-white LORRI images. One is the gorgeous high-resolution color face of Pluto and its vast heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio that graces the cover of this book. Another is the montage of Pluto and Charon as a double-planet system. We also love the color images of methane-snowcapped water-ice mountain ranges.
Our favorite black-and-white image of the flyby is of a high-resolution crescent Pluto, taken just fifteen minutes after New Horizons made its closest approach (see the photo insert). Why? Because it so vividly shows Pluto as a world with dramatic topography and concentric haze layers stretching half a million feet into its sky. That vista also reveals dramatic flows swirling across the surface of the gigantic, nitrogen-ice glacier named Sputnik Planitia, bordered by the towering mountain ranges of Norgay and Hillary Montes, their long shadows highlighting the planet’s rugged topography. Shot in sunlight a thousand times dimmer than the Sun shines here on Earth, the image is riveting both for capturing the alien beauty of the world called Pluto, as well as for what its existence captures about humans and our drive to explore. As New Horizons team scientist Cathy Olkin said, “This image makes you really feel like you’re there.”
Our favorite color image from the flyby is completely different, though it was also taken shortly after closest approach. That one, made about an hour after the crescent image just mentioned, was taken as New Horizons flew through Pluto’s shadow during the occultation experiments used to probe the planet’s atmosphere. This stunning shot (again, see the photo insert) reveals that Pluto’s atmosphere, perfused with sunlight, is a deep blue, just like Earth’s.
But we love this particular image most for another reason beyond its simple beauty. When Apollo astronauts first orbited the moon in 1968, they took pictures of the Earth rising above the Moon’s limb, and it defined the achievement of humans traveling off our planet, to the Moon, and it made humanity appreciate our own planet anew and marvel at what we humans can accomplish.
For us the blue backlit Pluto image evokes the same emotions that Apollo’s Earthrise image did. And we love the symmetry of the front-lit Apollo Earthrise image taken at the dawn of the era of planetary exploration, when most of the planets were still unexplored, complemented by the backlit far-side image of Pluto, taken on the very day that the capstone was placed on the first era of planetary reconnaissance—July 14, 2015.
When we look at this sublime image, we also think about how it was made and what it represents: that’s Pluto, backlit by the Sun. Just like the Apollo Earthrise image could only be made from the vicinity of the Moon, this image could only be made from the far side of Pluto.
As described in this book, the exploration of Pluto by New Horizons could have failed for so many reasons. It so easily could have failed to get funded. And New Horizons itself, by all rights, should not have been selected given its underdog, less experienced team going up against more experienced competitors. Given the short development time allotted and a budget only one-fifth of Voyager’s, New Horizons probably could also have failed to get built and then launched on budget and on time, or even at all. And it might have failed along the journey and not gotten the goods at Pluto. But it didn’
t fail. Instead it succeeded brilliantly—thanks to an amazing team, to determination, ingenuity, pluck, persistence, and some lucky breaks.
The people who created this amazing mission of exploration chased their new horizons hard; they never let go of their dream; they put everything they had into it; and eventually they chased it down and accomplished what they set out to do. To us the bluish image taken looking back at Pluto backlit by the Sun symbolizes the accomplishment of the exploration of Pluto.
Look at it again. We did it. We really did. We were there.
LOOKING AHEAD
After leaving the Pluto system, New Horizons was approved by NASA for a five-year, extended mission to study other bodies in the Kuiper Belt. The centerpiece of that mission will be the flyby of an ancient Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that represents the building blocks of small planets like Pluto. (The flyby’s target is one of the objects found by using the Hubble, in a dramatic search for flyby targets after Pluto, described in chapter 13).
That next flyby will take place on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 2019, a billion miles farther out than Pluto. The target, called 2014 MU69, is only about twenty miles across, but it appears to be a binary, just as Pluto and Charon are. New Horizons is planning to fly by MU69 at a range of barely two thousand miles, almost four times closer than its flyby of Pluto.
In addition to mapping MU69, studying its composition, and searching for moons and any atmosphere, as it travels outward through the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons will also study another two dozen or more KBOs from afar using its LORRI telescope/imager. Those studies will be used to search for satellites and rings, determine surface properties, rotation periods, and shapes for those objects, in order to put the close-up study of MU69 in better context. During this extended mission, New Horizons will also be used to conduct a five-year-long study of the environment in the Kuiper Belt by continuously monitoring the charged particles and dust there as it crosses out to a distance of fifty times as far from the Sun as Earth—the far limit of Pluto’s orbit. New Horizons will reach that distance in April of 2021, at which time it is scheduled to be turned off by radio command from Earth.
However, fuel and power projections indicate that New Horizons will be able to continue to operate in the service of exploration into the mid-2030s or even later. (That may be longer, we note, than many of its own builders operate.) So if NASA continues to fund the mission, New Horizons will follow the legacies of Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2—becoming a probe of the Sun’s distant heliosphere and the nearest reaches of interstellar space.
Then someday, perhaps in the late 2030s, or perhaps in the 2040s, there will not be enough power to run the spacecraft’s main computer and communications system, and New Horizons will fall silent. Nonetheless, it will continue its journey, speeding forever away from the Sun into interstellar space: a derelict—yes—but also an immortal denizen of the galaxy, and an emblem of what humans can achieve.
And what about Pluto? Will there someday be a return there and further exploration of that wonderland world and its fascinating moons?
We think so. There’s a growing scientific consensus that the mysteries New Horizons revealed and the scientific questions it has raised cannot be fully answered until an orbiter, which can explore Pluto in much more detail, and perhaps even a lander, are sent there. Studies to explore how that can be accomplished are already under way, and the next Planetary Decadal Survey in the early 2020s is likely to consider such a mission. We’re optimistic that a return to study the Pluto system in more depth will one day be funded. In addition, we think it’s likely that the other small planets of the Kuiper Belt will also likely be explored by spacecraft later in this century.
If we humans are nothing else, we are an inquisitive and restless species, explorers at heart. For that reason, we’re also optimistic that even humans will one day travel to the Kuiper Belt to explore it in person, making footfall on Pluto and other Kuiper Belt worlds, as we have already done on the Moon and will soon do on Mars, and then no doubt on many other worlds.
The first exploration of Pluto is complete, but the call of exploration beckons our species ever onward, into the wild black yonder of our solar system.
CODA
A FINAL DISCOVERY
The heroes of New Horizons are the engineers, scientists, and others who worked so hard for so long to set and achieve a lofty goal, to discover new things about the wonderful universe we live in, to inspire, and to make their own contribution to what is called “history.”
In accomplishing the exploration of Pluto, the New Horizons team set records and achieved many firsts. But more importantly, we think, they demonstrated to the world some of what are the best qualities of humankind: inquisitiveness, drive, persistence, and the ability to work in teams to achieve something larger than life.
Of those, more than anything else, New Horizons and the exploration of Pluto took persistence. Consider: it took thirteen years, countless battles, and six failed mission concepts just to win the funding to start building it. After that, it took another four years, galloping against all odds, to build and launch an outer-planets spacecraft in record time and at a breakthrough low cost. That in turn was followed by a marathon, nine-and-a-half-year journey across our entire solar system, by a lone robot and a small flight team on Earth, just to reach Pluto.
By exploring Pluto, New Horizons became the capstone mission to the initial reconnaissance of our vast, home solar system. In doing so, it turned the last of the planets known at the birth of the Space Age from a faraway point of light into a real place that humans have now come to know. And with that reveal, NASA, the United States, and our species completed a fifty-year-long quest to reconnoiter all the nine originally known planets—the space-age equivalent of Magellan’s first circumnavigation of our home planet.
The exploration of Pluto was a scientific success beyond what almost anyone expected. It produced countless discoveries and upended paradigms, teaching us that small planets like Pluto can be as complex as big ones, and that small planets can remain intensely geologically alive even billions of years after forming.
The public reaction to the exploration of Pluto helped to reawaken something partially forgotten since Voyager and Apollo: that people across the world love bold space exploration, are inspired by missions to never before explored places, and that such missions even have the power to inspire people and change lives.
Shortly after New Horizons flew past Pluto, Alan gave a talk in Vermont. After he spoke, a college student told him that for too long her generation had been saddled with the meme that their time was not as great as those of past generations. She said that their generation hadn’t witnessed wars that saved a world from fascism, that they missed the historic first steps on the Moon, the birth of computing, and so many other epochal events. Then she said that seeing Pluto explored was “our Moon landing, and the greatest thing that’s happened in our generation.” A shiver ran up Alan’s spine when she said that, and he realized that in her eyes the New Horizons mission had been successful in a way he had never before imagined.
A few months later, after Alan gave a talk to a business convention in Florida, he was approached by a middle-aged woman who came to him literally in tears. She explained that her teenage son had been a failing student until he saw the flyby of Pluto by New Horizons, and that Pluto’s exploration had inspired him to say, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up.” The mother wiped a tear and told Alan that her son had since transformed himself into a straight-A student. She said, “You all rescued my son.”
We believe that the power of these and other very human impacts made by New Horizons outshine everything learned about Pluto. And for us, nothing can substitute for that discovery.
—DAVID GRINSPOON, Washington, DC
—ALAN STERN, Boulder, CO
Clyde Tombaugh, circa 1930, after discovering Pluto at age twenty-four. (Lowell Observatory)
The 1930 telegram conveying the sugge
stion of Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old girl from England, that the newly discovered planet be named Pluto. (Lowell Observatory)
Alan Stern, age five, with his first scientific instrument, in New Orleans. (Alan Stern)
Original Plutophile and New Horizons science team member Marc Buie. (© Michael Soluri/michaelsoluri.com)
Longtime New Horizons science team members Tiffany Finley, Leslie Young, Ann Harch, and Cathy Olkin (all front frow). (© Michael Soluri/michaelsoluri.com)
Original Plutophile and New Horizons science team member Bill McKinnon. (© Michael Soluri/michaelsoluri.com)
Science team member and deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
New Horizons science team members Marc Buie and Hal Weaver. (© Michael Soluri/michaelsoluri.com)
New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman. (© Michael Soluri/michaelsoluri.com)
New Horizons Project Manager Glen Fountain at the Pluto flyby. (NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Some of the New Horizons women engineers, scientists, and flight controllers photographed at Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) three days before Pluto flyby. (© Michael Soluri/SwRI/JHUAPL)
Science team members Fran Bagenal and John Spencer at APL during the flyby. (Henry Throop)
New Horizons science team member and geology team lead Jeff Moore discusses fresh Pluto data with team members during the flyby. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
The NASA Outer Planets Science Working Group (OPSWG) in 1991. Alan and Fran (both seated) are in the center, Marc Buie is in the back row near center. (NASA)