Gadgetory

for my parents generation of scientists there were lots of first missions to new places to be a part of to be first to Mars and Venus and Jupiter and Saturn and all that and by the time I got a graduate school but it was really the only one left even though the missions that I've worked on otherwise are great science it was just irresistible to get on what we used to call the first mission to the last planet this is Alan Stern the project leader of the New Horizons mission which flew by Pluto on July 14th 2015 it marked the first time a vehicle ever visited the dwarf planet and nearly a year later the mission is still giving us crazy amounts of detail about the timing world at the edge of our solar system what had we known about Pluto before the mission even got started I mean what was the extent of our knowledge well we knew some really interesting things but for example we knew that Pluto is really a binary planet with a moon half its own size and that there's nothing else like it we'd had seen anywhere else in the solar system that that system probably formed like the Earth Moon through a giant impact which again was super interesting because there's not another analogue for the formation of the Earth Moon system except way out there Pluto Pluto is located in a region of the solar system called the Kuiper belt it's a big cloud at the edge of our galactic neighborhood filled with tiny icy bodies ranging from the size of Manhattan to the size of whole countries scientists used to think Pluto was the only tiny world orbiting beyond Neptune when it was first discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh but in the 1990s researchers started finding more objects and even more dwarf planets in this Kuiper belt region it became obvious to planetary scientists even the whole National Academy that there was this third class of planet in the Solar System and that Pluto was the harbinger of that because of Pluto's potential as a destination a planetary survey in the early 2000s listed the dwarf planet as the number one priority for space exploration among those in the scientific community the report helped to secure funding for the New Horizons mission which launched in January 2006 New Horizons was launched on a very very large expendable launch B of 2006 called an Atlas 5 in fact we bought the most souped-up tricked-out version of it you can get with every add-on every rocket lightweight nosecone everything it ended up being the fastest spacecraft ever launched we flew it to Jupiter first where Jupiter's gravity gave it a slingshot to make it go even faster so that we could cross the entire solar system in nine years New Horizons stayed in hibernation mode throughout most of its journey to Pluto with its last hibernation ending on December 6th 2014 just one month before the spacecraft entered its approach phase in January that's when things started to get exciting and a bit scary we had to fly through one little window in space there's only 60 by a hundred miles across and you could not arrive more than 9 minutes earlier 9 minutes late after a nine year journey somebody did the math and said that aim is equivalent to hitting a golf ball from LA to New York and landing in a soup can in Manhattan so we were taking images of Pluto on approach against the star fields and shipping them back to Earth by radio and having teams analyze those to see how far we were of course and to compute engine burn corrections which we did a series of to home in and we flew right through that little soup can window as New Horizons got closer and closer to Pluto photos taken by the spacecraft showed the dwarf planet in clear detail the images revealed the diverse shading and geography of Pluto as well as the presence of a large heart-shaped region on its surface finally after six months of approaching and one terrifying software glitch it was time for New Horizons to execute its primary mission the right word just to say it was emotional um we had put so many years and so much of our our lives into that and and as much as you practice with Brown simulations or with software simulations as much as we tested it on the ground and then it came down to just one day and at the same time most of us were pretty exhausted we've been working seven days a week in very long days for many weeks on approach because in addition to they can care of the spacecraft and look in every rock there was also new data landing all the time and the press was interested in hearing about it so we had to quickly analyze it the day of the flyby consisted of two big moments there was the time of the actual flyby which occurred at around 7:50 a.m. Eastern time that morning and then it was the time when the scientists got word back from New Horizons confirming that the flyby actually happened that signal didn't come until after 9 p.m. there are always unknown unknowns in the new horizons was traveling so fast that if we'd want to run into just one little rock pellet in orbit around Pluto the size of a rice grain it'd be game over and we'd never hear from it again so in the morning we all knew the spacecraft had gone by but because the spacecraft was busy taking data while it was there it wasn't talking to us until many hours later and then the signal from the spacecraft took almost five hours to get back to the earth so we knew down to the minute when the moment of truth would come and we were ready for it and when New Horizons checked in and all the signals were green it was bedlam it was awesome during the flyby New Horizons took over 450 different observations of the Pluto system the spacecraft has a big memory bank for storing this data but a less powerful communication system for sending it all back to earth we took a lot of data but we're sending it back at slow speeds so it takes more than a year for it all to get shipped back to earth and even here as we do this interview we've still got months to go and there are a lot of goodies up there and no one knows what discoveries are in it every week new data lands and and we open those packages and see what's inside and it's been there's never been a mission really like that and the data so far has shown Pluto to be something of an anomaly normally smaller and smaller worlds have less and less going on and that's the norm when you look at for example the moons of Saturn and Uranus and Neptune the bigger ones are a lot more interesting the smaller ones that bigger planets tend to be more active than the smaller ones and then we get the Pluto and we found well there's the exception to the rule it's just every bit as complicated as the earth or Mars and on top of it the thing is active it should have cooled off by now it's four billion years on and it's just roaring with geologic activity and atmospheric activity given how much we've learned from new horizons Stern says we need to make even more spacecraft just like it it would be super if we could build a next generation set of missions like New Horizons three or four more and fly them to other small planets and sample the diversity of that crazy part of the solar system we spent dozens of missions going to Mars and Venus and even Jupiter's up around ten missions now this is the biggest zone in the solar system the most populous zone in the solar system it's where most of the planets lie there have this really strange type that Pluto is and I think they easily deserve several more exploration missions and for the first time in the multi million year history of our species we're kind of stepping out of the cradle right here at the beginning of the 21st century and going out to explore the universe this is where Star Trek begins it's awesome