Humanity has now reached every planet in our solar system.
After more than than nine years and 3 billion miles of travel through deep space, NASA’s New Horizons whizzed past dwarf planet Pluto about 5:49 a.m. Tuesday, traveling at more than 30,000 miles per hour.
“Fifty years ago today, the U.S. was embarking on the beginning of an era of exploration of the solar system,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said, citing the Mariner mission to Mars. “It’s fitting that on that 50th anniversary, we complete the reconnaissance of the planets with the exploration of Pluto.”
And now the waiting begins.
Since launch in 2006, New Horizons has traveled the equivalent of 120,472 trips around the Earth, or traveling from Denver’s Union Station to Denver International Airport and back 63,291,139 times.
The spacecraft last communicated with mission control at 9:17 p.m. Monday night. The craft, which has now gone radio silent, is using its energy for science — pointing its instruments at Pluto and its moon Charon to collect data on its one-time trip.
Mission Control, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Science Lab, won’t hear from New Horizons again until about 6:50 p.m. Tuesday, when a signal sent from the spacecraft to Earth about four hours earlier reaches mission control.
“It will transmit a message back to Earth … whether it survived the passage through the Pluto system,” Stern said. “There’s a little bit of drama because this is true exploration. New Horizons is flying into the unknown.”
Stern said Monday that models indicate a low probability that New Horizons will suffer damage on its journey through Pluto’s system.
“I don’t think that we’re going to lose the spacecraft,” Stern said. “We’ve been furiously transmitting data to the ground over the last few days … but it would be gilding the lily a little bit if I didn’t tell you 99 percent of the data is still on the spacecraft.”
Although Stern remains hopeful, he said the science team has already downlinked “fail-safe data sets” from each area of the spacecraft’s study as a contingency plan.
The spacecraft will collect about 100 times more data on close approach to the planet than it can send home before the entire fly-by is over, according to NASA.
About 1 percent of the data collected during the approach and fly-by will be immediately sent back to Earth. This will include some images that the New Horizons team will share with the public as soon as they are processed.
Most of the data will be stored on board and downlinked to Earth beginning in September, providing scientists what Stern calls a “16-month data waterfall,” bringing scientists new and exciting discoveries over the next year.
And, in what’s possibly the most fascinating aspect of the 9½ -year-long wait, the data the team receives tomorrow will make Tuesday’s data obsolete, said Southwest Research Institute’s John Spencer, who heads up the mission’s geology and geophysics areas.
“Tomorrow’s pictures will be nearly 10 times better than today’s,” Spencer said. “We also get our first decent views of the small moons, Nix and Hydra, which up to now have been little more than just points of light … There’s stuff coming thick and fast from now on.”
Photos of Pluto will be collected during the fly-by by New Horizons’ two cameras: LORRI, which takes black-and-white images, and Ralph, which takes both panchromatic and color images.
Because some of the color data returned by New Horizons is outside the spectrum the human eye can see, a team of Boulder-based Southwest Research Institute planetary scientists feverishly worked overnight Monday to translate the latest image from LORRI into colors within our visible spectrum.
The fruits of their labor, however, gift us with the most clear view of Pluto ever seen, revealing never-before-seen details of Pluto’s surface.
The image is at a resolution of 4 kilometers per pixel, or about 1,000 times better than what the best telescopes on Earth can see of the planet.
“We didn’t know if there would be craters on the surface of Pluto … but because of the rapid pace of approach, suddenly ‘boom!’ We had topography,” Southwest Research Institute’s Alex Parker said from mission control Tuesday. “It’s emotionally impactful to see the planet go from a flat planet in the distance to now seeing it. Somehow it just became a real place.”
Scientists have thus far deduced that Pluto is about 1,500 miles across with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere. It has craters, peaks and ridges, and there is evidence of surface impacts from space objects as well as evidence of current or previous tectonic activity.
“I think the biggest discovery for me is that Pluto has a complicated geological history,” Spencer said. “That’s really basic information about Pluto that we had no idea about before yesterday … Is it an ancient surface or a young surface? And now we see maybe it’s both.”
It also snows on Pluto, Stern said, and that snow changes from solid to gas without passing through the liquid phase.
Colorado’s space and science community plays a huge role in New Horizons. Stern, from Southwest Research Institute, was part of the “Pluto Underground” in the late 1980s at the University of Colorado. The group started the push to explore Pluto — an effort spearheaded by Stern over the last two-plus decades.
New Horizons’ seven science instruments operate on a mere 200 watts, or about one-fifth the wattage of a standard household toaster — energy generated by a device called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, made by Lockheed Martin in Littleton.
Several small businesses have fingerprints on New Horizons as well: Custom Microwave in Longmont created a dark, radiation-absorbing coating is used on New Horizons’ instrument Alice, which will study Pluto’s atmosphere, and Starsys Research Corp in Boulder developed the spacecraft’s thermal management hardware.
Additionally, the spacecraft’s Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, or SDC, which assesses space-dust particles, was made by CU students, Louisville-based Sierra Nevada Space Systems created components for New Horizons’ thermal control system, and Ball Aerospace in Boulder created Ralph.
For Ball New Horizons project manager Lisa Hardaway, the experience has been unreal.
“I never would have expected this when I started my career, and even after 10 years, I still have to pinch myself that this is real,” she said.
NASA released a new image mid-day Tuesday, which was taken July 13 using three of the Ralph instrument’s color filters.
The image is an almost psychedelic, colorized version of Pluto and Charon. The exaggerated colors were used purposefully to better illustrate the diverse topography of the planet and its moon.
The Boulder-based Southwest Research Institute team currently at the Applied Science Lab will work around the clock for the next couple of weeks to process data from New Horizons.
“I don’t have any big-ticket items tonight, so I think tonight I can catch up on sleep a bit. Other days, there may be a deluge of data,” Parker said. “I’m on the hook for a couple more artistic products — a few things that engage a different part of the brain I haven’t drained … yet.”
And the work may continue for decades. If New Horizons survives the trip through Pluto’s system, it will continue deeper into the Kuiper Belt — an icy debris field extending into space from Neptune’s orbit.
A Southwest Research Institute team has identified two objects in the Kuiper Belt that warrant further exploration, and will soon decide which they will head toward. Then they will attempt to secure NASA funding for an extended mission.
Stern estimates the spacecraft could continue its mission for another 20 years.
Laura Keeney: 303-954-1337, lkeeney@denverpost.com or twitter.com/LauraKeeney
