It’s taken nine years for the NASA spaceship New Horizons to travel nearly 3 billion miles – to a far corner of our solar system, but later this month, it will fulfill its mission.
On July 14th, just before 8 a.m. New Horizons will begin a fly-by of Pluto, the dwarf planet named for the Roman god of the underworld. The space craft has traveled faster than any other launched from Earth, but after nine years, it won’t be able to stop for a visit.
"Even to get out there you have to expend so much energy, but then to include the amount of rocket fuel that would allow you to go into orbit would just be prohibitive," says Alan Howard, a UVA professor of geosciences, who will be at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab, which is serving as mission control. He hopes to learn more from the pictures sent back – whether the dwarf planet has mountains, valleys, rivers or lakes of liquid methane, what it’s atmosphere is made of and how old Pluto might be.
"The main thing we use in the solar system to date planetary surface is the number of impact craters, so if we don’t see many impact craters, that would suggest a really young age. If it’s really densely covered with impact craters that would suggest whatever that event that formed it was fairly agent – toward the beginning of the history of the solar system."
New Horizons has already detected patterns on the surface that scientists can’t explain, reinforcing Howard’s sense of wonder.
"It’s sort of Star Trek wonder – you know, Captain Kirk exploring new worlds in the universe, so it’s really happening."
In truth, Pluto is so far away that most of the data from this fly by won’t reach the Earth for a year, but Howard and his colleagues are already arriving at mission control in Maryland in a state of high excitement.
"We’ve actually had some counseling about how to lower stress levels."
Howard is confident the mission will be a success, but planners at NASA have come up with a list of nearly 250 things that could go wrong, and because the spacecraft will be busy as it flies by Pluto, it will stop transmitting data, leaving scientists and the public in a state of suspense for about 24 hours.
