The journey to Pluto the farthest world ever explored Alan Stern
On July 4, 2015,
a NASA spacecraft called New Horizons
was 5 billion kilometers away from Earth.
It was only 10 days away from Pluto,
after flying for 9.5 years,
when it suddenly dropped out of contact.
But let’s back up a little.
As of 1989,
mankind had successfully sent craft
to every known planet in the solar system
except one—Pluto.
You may have heard that astronomers
don’t consider Pluto
or its brethren to be planets.
However, most planetary
scientists still do,
which is why we’re using
that terminology here.
There’s a limited amount
we can learn about Pluto from Earth
because it’s so far from us.
Pluto, however, is a scientific goldmine.
It’s located in a region
called the Kuiper Belt,
home to many small planets,
hundreds of thousands
of ancient icy objects,
and trillions of comets.
This mysterious region holds clues
to the formation of our solar system,
and it was long,
tantalizingly beyond our reach.
Until New Horizons.
Its objectives: explore Pluto,
collect as much scientific
data as possible,
transmit it back to Earth,
then explore farther out
in the Kuiper Belt.
To achieve this, the New Horizons team
outfitted their craft
with seven state-of-the-art
scientific instruments.
Those included Ralph,
a set of cameras powerful enough
to capture features the size
of city blocks in Manhattan
from tens of thousands of kilometers away.
And REX, designed to use radio waves
to measure Pluto’s atmospheric pressure
and temperature.
All of the onboard equipment had to be
built to be both reliable and lightweight
because New Horizons had an
additional challenge;
it had to reach its target
as fast as possible.
Why?
Around 2020, Pluto will reach
a point in its orbit
where its atmosphere could freeze.
And due to the tilt of its axis,
more and more of Pluto’s surface
is shrouded in darkness every year.
Pluto completes a full orbit
once every 248 Earth years,
so it would be a long wait
for the next prime opportunity to visit.
To see how New Horizons
got to Pluto in time,
let’s jump to its launch.
Its three rocket stages accelerated
New Horizons to such great speeds
that it crossed the 400,000 kilometers
to the moon in just nine hours.
About a year later,
the craft reached Jupiter
and got what’s called a gravity assist.
That’s where it flies close enough
to the gas giant
to receive a gravitational
slingshot effect.
New Horizons was then flying
at around 50,000 kilometers per hour,
as it would for the next eight years
to cross the remaining gulf to Pluto.
Going at such an astonishing speed
meant that slowing down
to get into orbit or land
would’ve been impossible.
That’s why New Horizons was on
a flyby mission,
where it would get just one chance to
scream by Pluto and make its observations.
The flyby would have
to be fully automated,
since at that distance, any signals
to guide it from Earth
would take 4.5 hours to reach it.
So the team loaded the ship’s computer
with a series of thousands of commands,
called the core load,
that would begin to execute
when the craft was 6.5 days from Pluto.
But when New Horizons
was just ten days out,
disaster almost struck.
Ground control lost contact
with the spacecraft.
After two nerve-wracking hours,
New Horizons came back online,
but mission control discovered
that its main computer had rebooted,
losing the entire core load
and other critical data.
Without that, it would soon
whizz by Pluto
with virtually nothing
to show for the mission.
Alice Bowman,
the mission’s Operations Manager,
led a team for 72 sleepless hours
to get the instructions
loaded back into New Horizons in time.
Without room for a single error,
she and her team pulled it off,
and New Horizons began taking
and broadcasting breathtaking images.
Those observations have revealed
a delightfully varied world,
with ground fogs,
high altitude hazes,
possible clouds,
canyons,
towering mountains,
faults,
craters,
polar caps,
glaciers,
apparent dune fields,
suspected ice volcanoes,
evidence for past flowing liquids,
and more.
One of the most exciting discoveries
is the 1000-kilometer-wide
Sputnik Planitia glacier.
Sputnik Planitia is mainly composed
of slowly churning frozen nitrogen,
and we’ve never seen anything
like it in our solar system.
The exploration of Pluto
was a great success,
but New Horizons isn’t done yet.
On January 1, 2019,
it’ll break its own record for
furthest explored object
when it visits a Kuiper Belt Object
called 2014 MU69,
which is orbiting the sun another billion
kilometers farther away than Pluto.
The world is holding its breath
to see what it’ll find there.