Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

by Alan Stern

Alice Bowman, the mission’s coolheaded and enormously competent fourteen-year veteran Mission Operations Manager (hence her nickname: “MOM”).

reducing the Earth to the size of a basketball puts the Sun at 5.5 miles away! But Pluto orbits at an average distance some forty times farther from the Sun than Earth, which means that on this same basketball-Earth scale, Pluto is located 220 miles away!