When Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. delivered Ralph — the imaging instrument providing the “eyes” of the New Horizons mission — to NASA in April 2005, program manager Lisa Hardaway’s son Nathan was 6 months old.
Now, as New Horizons positions for its historic flyby of Pluto on Tuesday, he’s entering middle school.
“All of us count time by our kids,” Hardaway said. “On our team, we had three babies born in the span of a month (of Ralph’s delivery), and they all go to school together.”
Hardaway, an engineer at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, led the team that built Ralph, an instrument that will both provide navigational images and study Pluto’s surface geology to create color, composition and thermal maps of Pluto and one of its moons, Charon.
And now, as the world turns its attention to Pluto, thousands along the Front Range who have had a role in New Horizons finally will see their work come to fruition.
In fact, the mission to Pluto started in Colorado.
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern was a graduate student at the University of Colorado when he and five or six others — including mission co-investigator and now-CU professor Fran Bagenal — formed a group called Pluto Underground.
Its goal: a mission to study what was then considered our solar system’s ninth planet but has since been labeled a dwarf planet.
“Our first goal had to be realistic. The long-term goal is to do the exploration, but you don’t start by walking in the door to say, ‘I would like some budget for a mission to Pluto, NASA,’ ” Stern said. “There was no scientific case to make that. So we set an immediate goal to study how to do a mission to Pluto.”
The group selected Stern to go to NASA headquarters and pitch the idea.
He still has the meeting notes — from May 5, 1989.
Since that time, various iterations of the mission have struggled through red tape and have been greenlighted, funded, unfunded, revamped, killed and reborn.
Finally, in fiscal year 2002, the mission was given the go-ahead when Congress authorized $30 million for the project.
“It was like being in a maze for more than a decade,” Stern said. “And in 2000, NASA washed their hands of it. They held a press conference and said, ‘It’s dead, dead, dead.’ All of these people that had worked all these years — we wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
New Horizons was the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program. It will fly past Pluto a half-century to the day that Mariner 4 was the first spacecraft to fly past Mars.
“Colorado has been involved in that larger 50-year sweep: (CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics) was doing mission work on some of the earliest instruments that went to Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Mercury,” Stern said. “New Horizons is the closing chapter of this era that began in the ’60s. We’re running the anchor leg to that race and bringing the baton home.”
Launched in 2006
The $728 million New Horizons launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Jan. 19, 2006, aboard an Atlas V rocket built by about 1,000 Lockheed Martin workers in Littleton.
At the time, the spacecraft was the fastest ever launched: It reached Earth’s moon nine hours after launch and hurtled past Jupiter about 13 months later, using that planet’s gravity to slingshot it into space and shave three years off its trip.
When New Horizons passes Pluto, it will have traveled slightly more than 3 billion miles. That’s the same as circling Earth 120,472 times, or traveling from Denver’s Union Station to Denver International Airport and back 63,291,139 times.
In other words, it’s far.
However, it’s operating on very little power — a mere 200 watts, or about one-fifth the wattage of a standard household toaster — generated by a device called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, also from Lockheed Martin.
The durable RTG, which uses heat generated by plutonium to generate electricity, is only about the size of a piano bench. (If this device sounds familiar, you may have read the best-selling book ” The Martian,” in which astronaut Mark Watney uses an RTG to keep warm.)
Ralph — one of the seven science instruments powered by the RTG — weighs only 23 pounds and runs on about the same wattage as a standard night light.
So, is creating an instrument to travel 3 billion miles over 9½ years at speeds close to 47,000 mph to the outer reaches of our solar system in order to measure the unknown as simple as it sounds?
“There was quite a bit of trial and error — there always is in aerospace. What was unexpected were the types of glitches,” Hardaway said. “It’s kind of eye-opening; it’s not like going to Dad’s garage and building a shelf. We’ve tested this more than anything I’ve ever worked on to make sure when we get there, we won’t have a problem.”
About 40 Ball Aerospace workers make up the core team working on Ralph, Hardaway said, and 75 to 100 more were involved in the $22 million job at one time or another.
That stands in stark contrast to Longmont-based Custom Microwave, which, at the time of its work on New Horizons, only had a couple dozen employees.
That company’s solid reputation for high-precision component work landed it a contract with CU’s LASP to develop a very specific black coating that absorbs light and radiation in space.
Custom Microwave president Clency Lee-Yow said his company’s nickel phosphorus coating formula exceeds that used by industry behemoths Lockheed Martin and Ball Aerospace. It’s so dark that it prompts this question:
” How much more black could this be?” And the answer is none. None more black.
“There’s nothing compared to how black this is,” Lee-Yow said. “If you take something that’s really black and put this coating next to it, that black looks gray.”
Custom Microwave’s coating is used on New Horizons’ imaging instrument, called Alice, which will study Pluto’s atmosphere.
(Yes, Ralph and Alice were named after the bickering couple in the TV classic comedy “The Honeymooners.” Credit Stern for that one.)
The company also plays another important role: Communications between Earth and New Horizons will be managed through NASA’s Deep Space Network, which has components made by Custom Microwave.
Educational roots
New Horizons also carries an instrument that will help scientists learn more about the origin and evolution of our solar system.
The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, or SDC, is about the size of a cake pan, according to NASA, and assesses space-dust particles that hit New Horizons.
It is also the first student-built and -operated instrument to ever fly on a NASA planetary mission.
About 20 CU-Boulder students worked on the instrument from 2002 to 2005, among them, now-LASP flight software engineer Beth Cervelli.
She was 20 years old when she wrote SDC’s ground, test and flight software the summer before her senior year as an undergraduate computer science major.
It was a learn-as-you-go situation, she said, but mentors ensured the students “weren’t doing anything completely ridiculous.”
“I worked on it until I graduated … and followed it all the way up to the launch,” she said. “I couldn’t even rent a car when I traveled down to Florida for the launch. I was 23.”
The work she completed almost a decade ago is now reaching a milestone.
“It still doesn’t seem very real. It’s crazy to think that the software I wrote is running and almost at the farthest planet,” she said. “We’re going to be getting awesome discoveries for the next year. That’s the exciting part.”
Although many students who started the mission are long gone, others have taken their place, some who joined the LASP student team in 2010, around the same time that New Horizons was speeding at the rate of about 1 million miles a day somewhere between Saturn and Uranus.
That next generation, which includes post-doctorates, has a role on Stern’s team as well. And that tickles him to no end.
“It’s a little weird: There are grad students on this mission that were literally toddlers when we got this started,” he said. “But I haven’t hired anyone who was born after we started … yet.”
Terrific Tuesday
After 9½ years of flight, New Horizons is scheduled to pass Pluto shortly before 6 a.m. Tuesday at the speed of 31,000 mph.
It will take about 4½ hours for a message to reach Earth confirming the flyby and months to obtain the reams of data and images collected from the spacecraft’s view about 7,750 miles from the planet.
No one really knows what will be seen. Stern’s science team even held an internal poll that included the question “What are the most surprising things you think we’ll find on Pluto?”
“The most legitimate answer were liquids on the surface and ice volcanos. And the funniest? Chuck Norris.” Stern said. “But I don’t make predictions. I just say we’ll see something wonderful, something we didn’t expect.”
But the flyby isn’t the end for New Horizons. The data the spacecraft sends back will undoubtedly bring new understanding of our solar system.
And, if NASA extends the mission, the spacecraft will study the icy Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto for years to come.
For Stern, it’s all cause for celebration.
“There are many life goals that people have that once you accomplish them, you have to deal with them in the rearview mirror,” he said. “I try to think of this an analogous experience to someone who spent their entire life wanting to go to Africa, so they finally go. In my case, it’s just Pluto.”
Laura Keeney: 303-954-1337, lkeeney@denverpost.com or twitter.com/LauraKeeney
