Pluto

Chasing New Horizons

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 20:08:00 +0000

Chasing New Horizons Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/09/2018 - 14:08

Eric Gershon

This high-resolution image of Pluto was captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Photo Courtesy of NASA.

Q&A with Alan Stern

Alan Stern (PhD Astro’89) leads NASA’s New Horizons mission, which successfully sent a spacecraft of that name on a multi-billion-mile journey to Pluto and beyond. Stern and co-author David Grinspoon recently published a book about the endeavor, Chasing New Horizons: Inside The Epic First Mission to Pluto (Picador 2018). Here Stern talks about where the spacecraft is, what scientists have learned so far and dinner in London with the lead guitarist for the band Queen — an astrophysicist.

What's your best guess as to New Horizons’ location right now?

New Horizons is speeding through the Kuiper belt on its way to another fly-by of one of the building blocks of small planets like Pluto. That flyby is on the first of January, 2019. The target is called Ultima Thule, which means ‘beyond the farthest frontier’ in Latin. It will be the farthest exploration of any object in the history of humankind. It's really pretty awesome. This spacecraft, built on Earth, has traveled a little over 4 billion miles now, and it's covering almost a million miles every day.

We know for sure that it's still intact and operating — how do we know that?

Because the spacecraft communicates with us by radio on a regular basis. Sometimes once a week — when it's hibernating, on Mondays — and when it's in active operations, as often as several times a day.

There are many �� Boulder connections to New Horizons. If you would, talk to us a little bit about some of them. I know you can't list them all.

I'm a �� alum and I lead the project for NASA. It actually got started when I was a senior graduate student in 1988 and ‘89. There are two faculty members who are on our science team, Dr. Fran Bagenal and Dr. Mihály Horányi. And then we have quite a number of people who were �� students, either undergraduate or did their PhD, who work on the project here at SwRI, where I work, or they've moved to other institutions.

Remind me, was there any �� equipment onboard?

One of the seven scientific instruments was built at the University of Colorado. It's a dust impact detector called SDC for student dust counter. It is actually the first ever student-built instrument to fly on any NASA planetary mission. There were skeptics when we first proposed it, but it worked out so well that now virtually every mission that NASA flies to the planets includes a student-built instrument.

What did you want to accomplish in the book that maybe hadn't been accomplished by thousands of news stories?

David and I and our editors at Picador wanted Chasing New Horizons to really tell the whole inside story. We wanted people to understand how difficult it was to get this project up on its feet. How tough the competition was to win it. How much intrigue there was…

...including competition from one of your own professors?

Yes.

Intense competition, right?

Absolutely. The two finalist teams were our team and another team based at ��. That's a whole other story. But in our book we wanted to tell the whole story of how this came to happen, how much work went into it, how much persistence it took, some of the intrigue, and really tell a story of what it takes to build a spacecraft, to fly it across the solar system. And put it all in one place. So that people could see the sweep of the whole story of this epic exploration.

Did the process of writing a book, for you, lead to any new realizations about the mission or about Pluto or shadings on things that you had maybe observed but not fully processed?

This is going to sound lame, but the answer, I think, is no, in any significant way. When you live with it for 26 years, you’ve thought about it a lot. But part of the reason I'm saying no is I know that your follow up question would be, ‘Like, what?’ And I can't think of a single thing.

However, there's a second side to that: I'm getting questions that I've never been asked before, even though I've been talking to the media about New Horizons since the day we won the project. And the question you just asked is an example — I've never been asked that question.

For you, what's the most significant thing that we've learned about Pluto from New Horizons mission? If you're going to narrow it down to one thing you've learned so far, what's the big thing?

Alan Stern, center, and New Horizons team view some of the first photos of Pluto on July 14, 2015. Photo courtesy of NASA.

I have been asked that question before…

I'm sure.

And there is no one thing. There are two things that at the very top. And I can put everything else under those two. The first discovery is just how complicated Pluto itself is. Usually in planetary science, smaller bodies are simpler. But Pluto way bucks that trend. It's as complicated as the Earth or Mars. Now, realize Pluto is about the size of the continental United States, and there's a lot of geologic variety in the United States. But what we saw in Pluto just knocked our socks off — glaciers and mountain ranges and a complicated atmosphere with complicated weather and young areas and old areas and tectonics and avalanches. It's snowing there. I could go on and on. We see dynamics in the geology, and we see young surface features that are very large. There are volcanoes the size of Mauna Loa on this tiny little planet, and there are completely different surface compositions from one place to the other. It really rewrote the textbook on how complicated small planets can be.

Okay, so that's one of the big ones.

The other was that we found lots of signs of a geological activity on a vast scale. A common geophysical paradigm is that smaller worlds cool off quicker than big ones. Just like a cup of coffee will cool off a lot quicker than a vat of coffee. Pluto has somehow managed to be massively geologically active four billion years after formation. And we're not sure why.

That's true of Earth too, isn't it?

It is true of Earth, but the Earth is much larger.

So, for example, Pluto’s big satellite, Charon, is half Pluto’s size, and every place we look on its surface is very old. Because that engine ran out 4 billion years ago. As an aside, the way that we get the ages, we count the number of craters per square kilometer. It's the same idea as if it's raining outside and you run outside with a piece of paper: The longer it's out there, the more dots on a piece of paper. But on Pluto we find places like the big glacier called Sputnik is a million square kilometers — it's the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined — yet we can't find a single crater, which means it was born yesterday. Similarly, on Pluto’s largest volcanic feature — itself the size of Mauna Loa in Hawaii — we have a crater expert who thinks she found one crater. The point is, that 15,000-foot tall massif, that caldera, has been erupting in the recent past.

So that's going to provide a lot of fodder for continued study.

We want to go back with an orbiter.

What's a fun thing that we learned about Pluto that might not be scientifically all that interesting, but just kind of makes you go, ‘wow.’

Oh, that's easy. It's the heart. It's the little planet with a big heart.

And remind us, the heart-shaped region visible on Pluto’s surface in photographs represents what?

The western side is the giant glacier I was talking about, called Sputnik. The eastern side, we're not sure. To some of the photo geologists it looks like it’s windblown material that's come off the glacier and just happens to be distributed that way.

In general terms, who's doing what with all of the data that has already been transmitted back?

All the data from the Pluto Flyby is on Earth. It took a long time, but we sent it all back: 460-something separate scientific observations by seven instruments looking at Pluto and each of its five moons. All that data is not only on the Earth, we've archived it in NASA's planetary data system, which is open for anybody to use, anybody, anywhere.

Is there any consensus among those of you who are most closely tied to this about what the most burning question is, based on the information that you now have?

If you asked 25 of us, I bet you’d get 25 different answers. But also, I think you'd find some common themes, like: How is it active after 4 billion years? What's driving that energy source? Why is it so complicated? How did its satellite system form? And there are some big questions beyond that. For example, there's a whole set of discoveries about features on the surface that looked like liquids or slurries flowed or ponded in lakes on Pluto. They look like frozen lakes. But you can't have that on Pluto. It's too cold and the atmospheric pressure is too low to allow liquids to run. That's telling us probably that in the ancient past, Pluto had a much thicker atmosphere. Where did it go? Does it come and go, or was it just there once? How long was it there? We're just stunned — it's like a kid who is overwhelmed with their presents on Christmas morning. And all year long. And here we are, going on three years after the flyby, and feeling like we've got years of work to do just to make sense out of the flyby data, much less what we can do with more.

Do you talk much to Michael Brown from Caltech, [author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming]?

I'm on another science team with him. I know Mike very well. We completely disagree on this issue of what planets are, but otherwise we are colleagues.

That was going to be my next question: Do you agree with him, that Pluto isn't a true planet?

I don’t agree. In fact, most planetary scientists disagree with Mike. I realize Mike has a book, and he wants it to sell, too, so he gave it a very clever name. But it's just the case that planetary scientists consider these small planets, planets. We call them dwarf planets, but the sun is a dwarf star — does that make it not a star? And dwarf galaxies are galaxies — that's a term in astronomy.

The very simplest test you can tell your readers about is what I call “the Star Trek test.” And we all watch Star Trek from time to time, and they show up somewhere every episode and they turn on the viewfinder on the bridge. In about a second, the audience at home knows whether it's at a planet or if they're orbiting a comet or an asteroid or an alien spacecraft or some nebulous space or whatever. And that's really a pretty good test: If Pluto came up on the viewfinder of the bridge of the Enterprise or any other Star Trek vehicle, people would say, ‘Oh, we're orbiting a planet.’

I gather that Brian May, the guitarist for Queen and also an astrophysicist, took a real interest in New Horizons.

He did. In fact, He's got a blurb on the back of Chasing New Horizons.

Did he spend some time with you?

Yes, Brian came to the flyby. We made him an official collaborator. He has come to several scientific meetings. He's come here to Boulder. I saw him once in London for dinner, and we go to this little vegan restaurant in the West End, and he pulls out his laptop and he's got data. He's been working on it…

New Horizons data!

New Horizons data! He pulled that laptop out — it's Friday night about 9:00 — and I said, ‘Hey, I didn't bring any weapons to this table. I came unarmed.’ But he's a very serious guy about his science in addition to being very talented and successful musician.

So what's next for you? I mean, how do you top something like this?

I don't know that I have to top it. I don't look at it that way. I work on a lot of scientific missions, and I've got three kids and lots of things to do. When I was a kid, all I wanted to grow up, be involved in space exploration, I wanted to really make a contribution, to be a part of things that were important. And with New Horizons, I know we truly did.

A lot of people harp about ‘This is not America's greatest time.’ You know, ‘Great things happened in the past, but we're not really on our game.’ New Horizons is an example of this country exactly on its game, doing something historic that all the world could see.

Condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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Mission to Pluto: Accomplished

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 19:15:00 +0000

Mission to Pluto: Accomplished Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2015 - 13:15

Eric Gershon

At mission control, �� contingent shares moment of triumph

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft left Earth for Pluto in 2006, Jamey Szalay (PhDPhys’15) was in high school.

At 7:50 a.m. EST on July 14, 2015, as the spacecraft traveled within a cosmic breath of Pluto’s surface, he was a physicist with a stake in the mission.

“That was a pretty big moment for us,” says Szalay, a ��-Boulder doctoral candidate who has led data analysis for the Student Dust Counter, one of ��’s many contributions to the historic space voyage. The student-built device helps analyze space’s composition.

Scores of �� students, faculty, alumni and staff have participated in the decade-long mission, in which a spacecraft reached Pluto for the first time, then kept going.

Szalay, 27, was part of a �� contingent camped at mission control in Maryland in the days leading up to a series of climactic moments. Compatriots included fellow dust counter experts Marcus Piquette, also a student, and faculty physicist Mihaly Horanyi, who oversaw the project.

Celebrations began when the spacecraft was believed to be closest to Pluto’s surface, about 7,800 miles distant. They reignited with definitive word from New Horizons 14 hours later.

“That was the moment of relief,” says Szalay. “It was a big hold-your-breath until the spacecraft talks to you.”

Front and center throughout the triumph was Alan Stern (PhDAstro’89), chief mission scientist and the subject of the summer Coloradan’s cover story, “Voyage to Pluto.”

Like Szalay, Stern was having the time of his life.

“I don’t think any one of us could have imagined that this could have been a better toy store,” he said July 15, referring to the initial scientific bounty.

Indeed, New Horizons has already offered tantalizing new details about Pluto: It’s geologically active and has grand mountain ranges, plus a vast region shaped like a giant Valentine’s Day heart.

There’s still plenty for scientists to do: It will take about 16 months for the spacecraft to send all its new observations to Earth. Analyzing the data will take years — music to Szalay’s ears.

“Nothing trumps space science,” he says.

Photography courtesy NASA

At mission control, �� contingent shares moment of triumph

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Voyage to Pluto

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 17:30:00 +0000

Voyage to Pluto Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2015 - 11:30

Jim Scott

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about to become humanity’s first emissary to Pluto. Alan Stern has the insider view.

It’s been a while.

In 2006 Western Union scrapped its telegram service, Twitter was born and a tiny but mighty spacecraft roared away from the Florida coast on a journey of more than 3 billion miles to Pluto and beyond.

Dubbed “The Fastest Spacecraft Ever Launched,” New Horizons reached supersonic speed in 28 seconds, easily escaped Earth’s gravity well and plowed toward Jupiter at 36,000 miles per hour.

New Horizons infographic detailing the journey to Pluto.

The spacecraft, about the size of a baby grand piano, would cover half a billion miles in a lickety-split 13 months, intersecting Jupiter’s orbit at a moment when its gravity would slingshot New Horizons forward, accelerating it to 41,000 miles per hour.

Even at these spectacular speeds, New Horizons would need nine years to reach Pluto, the most distant of the traditional planets in Earth’s solar system.

Now the epic journey has reached its final countdown. On July 14 the spacecraft is expected to come closer to Pluto than any Earth emissary has, flying within 7,000 miles of its surface before shooting into the unexplored region known as the Kuiper Belt.

Alan Stern is chief mission scientist.

“We are going to the frontier of the solar system,” says Alan Stern (PhDAstro’89), chief scientist of the NASA-sponsored mission. “It’s like exploring the Wild West. We will be seeing a new class of planets, and what we are most looking forward to is being surprised.”

In January New Horizon’s imagers and spectrometers began a salvo of operations that will intensify upon approach, focusing on Pluto and its five known moons.

The only one of the craft’s seven major scientific instruments to operate continuously since launch was built at ��-Boulder — by students. The Student Dust Counter (SDC) measures the miniscule building blocks of planets, providing new data on how plants form. It is the first student-built instrument ever to fly on a NASA interplanetary mission.

Together New Horizons’ instruments will provide the most detailed picture ever of a tiny planet that continues to inspire affection despite its hotly debated 2006 demotion to dwarf planet-status.

Scientists are keenly interested in the composition of Pluto’s icy surface and its tenuous atmosphere, which may at times have clouds and winds and appears to experience seasonal changes, including snow, as the planet moves nearer and farther from the sun.

“We really have little sense of what Pluto looks like,” says ��-Boulder planetary scientist Fran Bagenal, a member of the New Horizons science team. “Even with the Hubble Space Telescope, it just looks like a fuzzy blob. But with New Horizons we will get our first detailed glimpse of the surface. We will see whether there are craters, or volcanoes, or frost, or tectonic cracks — or something totally unexpected.”

The first serious plans for a NASA Pluto mission were hatched in May 1989, when Stern, then a �� graduate student, and Bagenal dined in Baltimore with about 10 other scientists, a group that became known as the “Pluto Underground.” The movement gained steam after NASA’s Voyager 2 explored Neptune later that year and sent back breathtaking images of the blue giant’s wondrous rings and moons.

Still, it took more than 15 years before Congress agreed, in 2002, to fund New Horizons.

“We picked ourselves up off the floor six different times and never quit,” says Stern, a former top NASA scientist and now a research executive with the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder. “In the end what really sold the mission to NASA was the discovery of the Kuiper Belt in 1992. After we found there was a third zone to our solar system, everyone realized the real importance of Pluto as a new class of planet.”

Scientists are revved up about the Kuiper Belt, which includes the 1,500-mile-wide Pluto (smaller than Earth’s moon) and spans more than a billion miles past Neptune’s orbit. The region is believed to harbor some 70,000 objects more than 60 miles in diameter and billions of comets, each containing material created during our solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago.

The New Horizons spacecraft started its 3-billion-mile trip to Pluto in 2006. It’s almost there.

Stern, 57, has been involved in 26 different space missions, beginning with suborbital rocket payloads during his ��-Boulder days. He served as administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in 2007, the same year he was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Prior to that, in 1994, he started the Boulder office of the San Antonio-headquartered SwRI, growing it from two to nearly 100 people, including some of the best space science researchers in the world.

A New Orleans native raised in Texas, Stern has flown in F-18 Hornet jets to search for asteroids from the stratosphere, consulted for space entrepreneur Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic, and founded the Golden Spike Company with former NASA Johnson Space Center director Gerry Griffin; their goal is to provide the first commercial space transportation services to the moon.

“I never wanted to be a fireman or policeman as a kid,” says Stern. “All I remember ever wanting to be was a space explorer.”

He was influential in making ��’s Student Dust Counter — a thin plastic film resting on a honeycombed aluminum structure mounted on the outside of the spacecraft — part of the Pluto mission. The instrument assesses each microscopic dust particle that strikes the detector, allowing inference of the mass and possible origin of each.

A revolving cast of more than 20 ��-Boulder undergraduate and graduate students began designing and building it in 2002, according to Professor Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and chief scientist for the SDC. It was finished in 2005 as New Horizons was being readied for launch. In July, Horanyi says, former team members plan to return to Boulder to share the moment of encounter.

New Horizons’ Colorado connections run deep. Of more than 30 SwRI researchers who helped design its instruments, serve on the science team or are responsible for payload operations, 12 are ��-Boulder alumni.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Littleton built the 224-foot Atlas V launch rocket, the only system powerful enough to boost New Horizons to the solar system’s outer planets, as well as its plutonium-powered thermoelectric generator. And Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder built one of the seven core instruments, named Ralph (after character Ralph Kramden of the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners); it will help scientists map the surface of Pluto and its moons and assess their compositions.

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built and operates the spacecraft.

Hoping NASA will fund New Horizons for an extended mission after the Pluto encounter, astronomers have used Hubble to identify two Kuiper Belt objects in reach, each measuring about 40 miles across.

As it travels through space, New Horizons bears mementos, including some of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes. He discovered Pluto in 1930.

How will it end for New Horizons? It might not, ever.

Astronomers believe that in about 5 billion years, the sun will swell like a balloon and vaporize the inner planets, including Earth. But New Horizons, its fuel spent, will continue cruising through space in a frozen state at about 35,000 miles per hour: Once set in motion, an object in the vacuum of space keeps on trekking.

“Nothing in space will age it or change it substantially,” says Stern. “Think about it: The Earth will be gone, and New Horizons will survive. Pretty amazing.”

Render by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI); Photography courtesy Southwest Research Institute (portrait); NASA (launch)

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about to become humanity’s first emissary to Pluto. Alan Stern has the insider view.

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Infographic: Space Travel

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 17:15:00 +0000

Infographic: Space Travel Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2015 - 11:15

First Trip to Pluto

In mid-July, the New Horizons spacecraft is expected to pass by Pluto, offering humanity its most detailed picture ever of the dwarf planet. ��-Boulder has played a major role in the nine-year expedition to the edge of Earth's solar system: Alumnus Alan Stern (PhDAstro'89) is the mission's top scientist, and the spacecraft carries a scientific instrument designed and built by �� students. After passing Pluto, New Horizons will head into the surrounding Kuiper Belt and, if it survives, into the endlessness of space. For more, see "Voyage to Pluto."

New Horizons

*Actual flightpath differs

New Horizons timeline

Journey duration: Nine years. Pluto is more than 3 billion miles away from Earth.

01/19/06 – Launch: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida

04/17/06 – Mars orbit crossing

02/28/07 – Jupiter flyby

12/28/09 – Halfway point (in distance)

10/16/10 – Halfway point (in time)

03/18/11 – Uranus orbit crossing

08/25/14 – Neptune orbit crossing

07/14/15 – Closest approach to Pluto

Photography © iStock/paramater; © iStock/ipopba; © iStock/Stratol; © iStock/Kummeleon; © iStock/inhauscreative; © iStock/oorka; © iStock/3quarks; © iStock/forplayday; © iStock/PandaWild; © iStock/Stiggdriver

In mid-July, the New Horizons spacecraft is expected to pass by Pluto, offering humanity its most detailed picture ever of the dwarf planet.

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Summer 2015

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Pluto

Chasing New Horizons

Q&A with Alan Stern

What's your best guess as to New Horizons’ location right now?

We know for sure that it's still intact and operating — how do we know that?

There are many �� Boulder connections to New Horizons. If you would, talk to us a little bit about some of them. I know you can't list them all.

Remind me, was there any �� equipment onboard?

What did you want to accomplish in the book that maybe hadn't been accomplished by thousands of news stories?

...including competition from one of your own professors?

Intense competition, right?

Did the process of writing a book, for you, lead to any new realizations about the mission or about Pluto or shadings on things that you had maybe observed but not fully processed?

For you, what's the most significant thing that we've learned about Pluto from New Horizons mission? If you're going to narrow it down to one thing you've learned so far, what's the big thing?

I'm sure.

Okay, so that's one of the big ones.

That's true of Earth too, isn't it?

So that's going to provide a lot of fodder for continued study.

What's a fun thing that we learned about Pluto that might not be scientifically all that interesting, but just kind of makes you go, ‘wow.’

And remind us, the heart-shaped region visible on Pluto’s surface in photographs represents what?

In general terms, who's doing what with all of the data that has already been transmitted back?

Is there any consensus among those of you who are most closely tied to this about what the most burning question is, based on the information that you now have?

Do you talk much to Michael Brown from Caltech, [author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming]?

That was going to be my next question: Do you agree with him, that Pluto isn't a true planet?

I gather that Brian May, the guitarist for Queen and also an astrophysicist, took a real interest in New Horizons.

Did he spend some time with you?

New Horizons data!

So what's next for you? I mean, how do you top something like this?

Read more about NASA's voyage to Pluto in the Coloradan.

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Mission to Pluto: Accomplished

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Voyage to Pluto

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Infographic: Space Travel

First Trip to Pluto

New Horizons

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Pluto

Chasing New Horizons

Q&A with Alan Stern

What's your best guess as to New Horizons’ location right now?

We know for sure that it's still intact and operating — how do we know that?

There are many ���������� Boulder connections to New Horizons. If you would, talk to us a little bit about some of them. I know you can't list them all.

Remind me, was there any ���������� equipment onboard?

What did you want to accomplish in the book that maybe hadn't been accomplished by thousands of news stories?

...including competition from one of your own professors?

Intense competition, right?

Did the process of writing a book, for you, lead to any new realizations about the mission or about Pluto or shadings on things that you had maybe observed but not fully processed?

For you, what's the most significant thing that we've learned about Pluto from New Horizons mission? If you're going to narrow it down to one thing you've learned so far, what's the big thing?

I'm sure.

Okay, so that's one of the big ones.

That's true of Earth too, isn't it?

So that's going to provide a lot of fodder for continued study.

What's a fun thing that we learned about Pluto that might not be scientifically all that interesting, but just kind of makes you go, ‘wow.’

And remind us, the heart-shaped region visible on Pluto’s surface in photographs represents what?

In general terms, who's doing what with all of the data that has already been transmitted back?

Is there any consensus among those of you who are most closely tied to this about what the most burning question is, based on the information that you now have?

Do you talk much to Michael Brown from Caltech, [author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming]?

That was going to be my next question: Do you agree with him, that Pluto isn't a true planet?

I gather that Brian May, the guitarist for Queen and also an astrophysicist, took a real interest in New Horizons.

Did he spend some time with you?

New Horizons data!

So what's next for you? I mean, how do you top something like this?

Read more about NASA's voyage to Pluto in the Coloradan.

Off

Mission to Pluto: Accomplished

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Voyage to Pluto

Off

Infographic: Space Travel

First Trip to Pluto

New Horizons

Related Articles

There are many �� Boulder connections to New Horizons. If you would, talk to us a little bit about some of them. I know you can't list them all.

Remind me, was there any �� equipment onboard?