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The core material of this book came out of a long series of phone conversations the two of us had, every Saturday morning for a year and a half, in which we retraced the long adventure of New Horizons as Alan told David his memories of the project and all its precursors and phases. Out of the transcripts of these chats between us, David wrote the first drafts of most of the chapters, which we then both edited and rewrote many times, passing drafts back and forth and winnowing the narrative. The result:
traveling at the speed of light. To stay in touch, New Horizons depends, as do all long-distance spacecraft, on a largely unknown and unsung marvel of planetary exploration: NASA’s Deep Space Network. This trio of giant radio-dish complexes in Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia, seamlessly hands off communication duties between one another as the Earth rotates on its axis every twenty-four hours. The three stations are spread around the world so that no matter where an object is in deep space, at any time at least one of the antenna complexes can point in its
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Nasa deep space network
There is a phrase from World War I describing warfare as “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” The same applies to long spacecraft missions. And it was a long and frankly terrifying hour as they awaited the hoped-for signal to return from New Horizons. Then,
Long spacecraft mission
begin. This would be weeks of work under normal circumstances; but they didn’t have weeks, they had ten days until New Horizons reached Pluto and only three days until the start of the critical data taking for closest approach, when all of the most valuable scientific observations would be made.
Why pluto new horizon mission coukd lead to new scoence
By 1970, NASA had managed to launch only seven spacecraft beyond Earth to reach other planets—three to Venus and four to Mars.
Nasa three planetray spacecrafts in 1970
These first interplanetary crossings had all been “flybys,” missions which simply sent a spacecraft zooming past a planet, with no ability to slow down to orbit or land, gathering as many pictures and other data as possible during a few hours near closest approach. (Note: we say “simply,” but, as the following pages of this book illustrate, there is actually nothing simple about it.)
First missions were just flyby
Shortly after, Mariner 10 would make the first visit to Mercury, traveling there by way of Venus, where it would make the first ever use of a “gravity assist,” a nifty trick that has since become indispensable for getting around the solar system. In a gravity-assist maneuver, a spacecraft is sent on a near-miss trajectory to one planet, which pulls it in and then speeds it toward its next target. It seems too good to be true—like getting something for nothing, but it’s not—the equations of orbital mechanics do not lie. For the planet, the tiny loss of orbital speed it trades with the
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The gravity assist
The planets, each one on its own orbit around the Sun, need to be arranged in just the right way, like beads strung on an arc, stretching from Earth to Pluto. Like a secret passageway appearing only briefly every couple of centuries, the motions of the planets line up to create such a conduit only once every 175 years.
Why timing was crucial to.implementna good gravity assist
There were lessons here for a young reader: The laws of physics can be our friends. They can be used to achieve things that would otherwise be beyond reach. And sometimes things line up just right to provide opportunities that, if not seized, won’t come around again for a very long time.
Laws of physics can work for humans
first. For example, Mariner 9, the Mars orbiter that finally revealed the “Red Planet” in all its detail and glory was successful. But its twin Mariner 8 ended up crashed beneath in the Atlantic Ocean due to rocket failure. A similar fate had met Mariner 1, though Mariner 2 made it to Venus, and Mariner 3 had failed, but Mariner 4 got to Mars.
Power of back uo plans
Recognizing that the opportunity would not come again in their lifetimes, the science community scrambled to reduce cost and rescue the grand tour, producing a scaled-down version called the “Mariner Jupiter-Saturn” mission, with the more modest goals of exploring only the two largest and closest outer-solar-system planets: Jupiter and Saturn. This twin-spacecraft mission, at just under $2.5 billion in today’s dollars, was approved in 1972. A contest was held to formally name the spacecraft, and they were christened Voyager 1 and 2 just months before their launches in August and September
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Why pluto didnt get scaled or reached innfirst go
Titan has proved to be a world of wonder with methane clouds, rainfall and lakes, and vast fields of organic sand dunes—truly one of the most enticing places ever explored.
Titan theory
Alan remembers how, in the late 1980s, “Somebody much more senior told me, ‘You will never sell going to Pluto to NASA as exploration. You have to find a way to bring the scientific community to declare it is an important priority for the specific science that such a mission will yield.’” DISCOVERING PLUTO—1930 Of all the classically known planets, Pluto was not just the farthest and the last to be explored, it was also the most recently discovered—within the lifetime of many people who are still alive. Its discovery in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas farm boy with no formal technical
Make the sci comm say pluto is worth discovering.
Success was far from guaranteed. Some senior colleagues told him that he was wasting his time; that if there were any more planets, they would have already been found in previous searches. No wonder Clyde suffered bouts of low morale and self-doubt. But still he kept going.
The influence of senior scientists
At that moment, Tombaugh knew he had bagged his quarry. He also knew that he was the first person to discover a new planet in decades.3 That minuscule pale dot, hopping back and forth like a flea on a dark plate surrounded by a forest of stationary stars, was the first glimpse of a place never before spotted by human eyes.
First time pluto was seen
In no time at all, the sensational news spread around the world. The New York Times ran the banner headline: NINTH PLANET FOUND AT EDGE OF SOLAR SYSTEM: FIRST FOUND IN 84 YEARS, and the story was run by countless other papers and radio broadcasts.
New planet discovered headline
But it was Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old school girl in England, who suggested the name “Pluto,” after the Roman ruler of the underworld. Her grandfather mentioned Venetia’s idea to an astronomer friend, who in turn sent a fateful telegram to Lowell Observatory, saying:
Who nnamed pluto
With the advent of actual planetary exploration in the 1960s, the planets, once merely points of light glimpsed vaguely through telescopes, became real worlds to be reconnoitered and studied with powerful new tools and techniques, including many borrowed from the study of our own home planet, the Earth. Planets have rocks and ice, landforms, weather, clouds, and climate. So the effort to figure out the planets drew in geologists, meteorologists, magnetospheric experts, chemists, and even biologists. Given its complexities, it especially attracted adventurous scientific types who were up for
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Birth of plan scirnce
Whereas Earth takes twenty-four hours to rotate once, Pluto spins at a comparatively stately pace, taking about 6.4 times as long between each successive sunrise—more slowly than any planets except Venus and Mercury.
How long does pluto ntake to rotate
Then in 1976, planetary astronomers at a mountaintop observatory in Hawaii discovered the subtle spectral fingerprints of methane frost (frozen natural gas!) on Pluto’s surface.1 This provided the first evidence that Pluto’s surface is made out of truly exotic stuff.
Plutos exotic stuff
And the surprises didn’t stop there. Compared to Pluto Charon was huge, with a mass almost 10 percent of Pluto’s: the pair literally formed a double planet (sometimes also called a binary)—a first in our solar system! A double planet was something completely unknown in planetary science before the discovery of Charon.
Double planet
In 1988, and still a grad student, Alan started to ponder the possibility of sending a spacecraft mission to Pluto. He could see that the first, and in some ways biggest, hurdle to getting such a mission started would be more social and political than technical or scientific.
He asked Briggs, “With Voyager winding down, why don’t we complete the job of exploring the solar system? Would you fund a study of how to do a mission to Pluto?”
How cool nd bold!
compact and modern instruments designed to maximize science per pound, including a camera and infrared spectrometers to photograph and map Pluto’s surface, an ultraviolet spectrometer to examine the atmosphere, and a plasma instrument to measure interaction with the solar wind.
Science on spacecraft
And there were always many more good ideas than available funding.
Their planetary exploration program, which in past decades had been so successful at landing spacecraft on the Moon and on Venus and intercepting Halley’s Comet, was barely on life support. They had capable scientists, and they had huge, reliable rockets, called Protons. But they had no interplanetary spacecraft to launch on these rockets, and no resources to build new spacecraft. They also lacked NASA’s experience with missions to the outer planets.
Russian space program
What made matters ultra-scary: proposals would be due on March 21; a schedule that seemed nearly impossible. NASA proposals for missions like this often run to a thousand pages of detailed design, comprehensive science, management plans, schedules, budgets, team bios, and more.
1000 page proposals
Shockingly, and despite NASA’s just-announced competition for Pluto missions, the budget zeroed all NASA funding for a Pluto mission and instead made the Europa mission a new start! Within a day or two of that, NASA aborted the Pluto proposal competition. Alan was incredulous. And furious. And he suspected the hand of JPL, who stood to gain from the competition’s demise:
Shock of federal budget
The most ingenious of these savings was the plan to have the spacecraft go into “hibernation” during a large part of the trip, meaning that the spacecraft would shut down most of its systems for years between Jupiter and Pluto, with only minimal communication and navigation capabilities
Hibernation mode
An accident on New Horizons could, in effect, doom the future exploration of the outer solar system.
Imp mission
fly. It would be gone, and whether it succeeded or failed, he would never see it again.
He would see it only this once and then it was gone and he may never see it again
That drove home how many things had to be performing perfectly at the same time, in so many different places, in order for everything to be Go for launch.
Why launch was imp
newly discovered small planets in the Kuiper Belt as “dwarf planets,” a term Alan coined in a 1991 research paper mathematically calculating that the solar system might contain as many as one thousand of them.
Dwarf planets in solar system
As a result, the stripped-down New Horizons team remained remarkably busy for ten straight years.
So muh wrk for the new horizon team!
gravity assist needed to target Pluto. If that didn’t succeed, the spacecraft would be headed elsewhere, and it would be game over for Pluto exploration. Second, Jupiter was the only encounter with anything before Pluto, so that flyby was the one opportunity to practice an actual planetary encounter,
The Target
In all, almost 700 observations of the Jupiter system were planned, involving all seven instruments on New Horizons.
Data from the solar system
Earth. Instead, it would be doing what it was built to do: photographing Pluto’s surface in detail; mapping its surface composition; studying its atmosphere; then turning to image Pluto’s giant moon, Charon, and briefly studying each of Pluto’s four small moons. Some 236 separate scientific observations of each of the six bodies in the Pluto system, using all seven of the New Horizons instruments, were made over the next roughly thirty hours.
The power of that pluto mission
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.
What new horizon demonstrates
