{"id":18547,"date":"2018-04-30T22:58:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T14:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/plutos-champion-recounts-first-mission-to-icy-world-and-gears-up-for-the-next-one\/"},"modified":"2018-04-30T22:58:10","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T14:58:10","slug":"plutos-champion-recounts-first-mission-to-icy-world-and-gears-up-for-the-next-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/plutos-champion-recounts-first-mission-to-icy-world-and-gears-up-for-the-next-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Pluto\u2019s champion recounts first mission to icy world \u2013 and gears up for the next one"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Pluto
The 1991 stamp that served as the rallying cry for the New Horizons mission to Pluto is \u201cupdated\u201d by members of the New Horizons science team on July 14, 2015, the day the spacecraft flew past Pluto. Principal investigator Alan Stern is at far left. (Credit: Bill Ingalls \/ NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It took nine years for NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft to get to Pluto, and laying the groundwork for that history-making space mission here on Earth took nearly twice as long.<\/p>\n

The drama and intrigue surrounding New Horizons during those decades, as chronicled in a new book titled \u201cChasing New Horizons: Inside the First Mission to Pluto,\u201d might be enough for any planetary scientist. But Alan Stern \u2014 the book\u2019s co-author, the mission\u2019s principal investigator and arguably Pluto\u2019s most ardent defender \u2014 is ready to do it all again.<\/p>\n

Stern doesn\u2019t expect his campaign to send an orbiter to Pluto to face quite as many challenges, now that the world knows so much more about the dwarf planet with a giant heart.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope it\u2019s a more straightforward process,\u201d Stern told GeekWire. \u201cFirst of all, there are now a lot more people who are interested in going back to Pluto. \u2026 Now that we\u2019ve done the flyby, there isn\u2019t a planetary scientist in the world that isn\u2019t impressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, Stern and other New Horizons scientists signed onto a white paper calling for NASA to fund an in-depth study of potential Pluto orbiter missions. That grass-roots approach mirrors how the \u201cPluto Underground\u201d campaign for New Horizons got started around a restaurant table in Baltimore,  back in 1989.<\/p>\n

\""Chasing
\u201cChasing New Horizons\u201d by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. (NASA \/ SwRI \/ Zitane \/ Picador \/ LeeAnn Falciani Jacket Design)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cChasing New Horizons,\u201d written by Stern and astrobiologist David Grinspoon, traces the twists and turns that led from there to the piano-sized spacecraft\u2019s launch in 2006 and its Pluto flyby in 2015.<\/p>\n

Stern and Grinspoon recount how their team worked with \u2014 and competed against \u2014 more experienced mission planners at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; how they tried and failed to get the Russians involved in doing a more ambitious mission; how they kept New Horizons alive after one NASA official declared it dead, dead, dead; and how they joined forces with the underdogs at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to pull off a mission many said couldn\u2019t be done.<\/p>\n

The most harrowing crisis came just days before the flyby, when the spacecraft went out of contact with ground control due to an unanticipated computer glitch. The probe came back online, but New Horizons\u2019 engineers had to scramble day and night to retransmit and verify the detailed instructions for the Pluto encounter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey did literally months of work in just a few days,\u201d Stern recalled.<\/p>\n

Why go through decades\u2019 worth of trouble for the sake of one of the lesser-known, less appreciated members of the solar system\u2019s planetary menagerie?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat space engineer wouldn\u2019t want to be on the first mission to the last planet?\u201d Stern asked in reply.<\/p>\n

When New Horizons was launched, Pluto was still widely considered the solar system\u2019s smallest and farthest-out planet. But only months into the trip, a controversial vote by the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto and other worlds of its ilk as dwarf planets \u2014 and declared that dwarf planets should not be regarded as true planets.<\/p>\n

Stern said he and Grinspoon originally wrote a whole chapter about the planethood debate. But when the publisher told them to trim their manuscript by 40 percent, that section was shrunk down to a mere three pages in a 320-page book.<\/p>\n

Downplaying the debate was the right choice: It helps keep the focus on the mission, and lets the authors talk about Pluto\u2019s planethood without provoking an argument. Besides, there are plenty of other books (including \u201cThe Case for Pluto,\u201d by yours truly) that address the IAU decision in depth.<\/p>\n

\"pluto\"
\nScience journalist Alan Boyle<\/strong> is the author of “The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made A Big Difference.”<\/p>\n

\u201cThis whole IAU debacle will be some sort of a weird trivia question 30 years from now, because I think our side has all but won,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThe only problem we really have is that we don\u2019t think voting is the appropriate way to do things in science, so we don\u2019t want to take it back to another vote. We\u2019re trying to just change minds by consensus \u2014 which is working.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether you call it a planet, a dwarf planet or a Kuiper Belt object, Pluto\u2019s status has definitely risen thanks to the pictures and data sent back by New Horizons.<\/p>\n

The smooth, heart-shaped region now known as Tombaugh Regio, in honor of Pluto\u2019s discoverer, has become a bonafide internet meme. Other pictures reveal the blue glow of Pluto\u2019s thin atmosphere, backlit by the sun; evidence of clouds and ice volcanoes; and towering mountains thought to be made of frozen water. Pluto\u2019s biggest moon, Charon, is a book-worthy subject by itself.<\/p>\n

All these discoveries, and the additional scientific questions they raise, are whetting Stern\u2019s appetite for a follow-up mission to Pluto. But that\u2019s not the only thing on his mind.<\/p>\n

For example, the New Horizons team has to get ready for another flyby, past a smaller object in the icy Kuiper Belt known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule. That\u2019s due to take place on Jan. 1, and the resulting data will keep the team busy for months afterward.<\/p>\n

Stern is also on the science teams for NASA\u2019s Europa Clipper mission to a mysterious, ice-covered moon of Jupiter; NASA\u2019s Lucy mission to a set of asteroids captured in Jupiter\u2019s orbit; and a Kuiper Belt mission that could be proposed next year. And if that\u2019s not enough, he has yet another book in the works, titled \u201cLaunch to Leadership: Nine Business Lessons From the Exploration of Pluto.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those are a lot of new horizons for Stern to keep track of. Fortunately, he\u2019s the kind of scientist who revels in the chase.<\/p>\n

Stern and Grinspoon will discuss the book and the New Horizons mission during a talk titled \u201cInside the First Mission to Pluto,\u201d presented at Seattle\u2019s Museum of Flight in partnership with Town Hall Seattle at 7:30 p.m. on May 17. The talk is part of a nationwide book tour that begins this week in Washington, D.C. For the full list of tour dates, check the events page online at AlanStern.space.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1991 stamp that served as the rallying cry for the New Horizons mission to Pluto is \u201cupdated\u201d by members of the New Horizons science team on July 14, 2015, the day the spacecraft flew past Pluto. Principal investigator Alan Stern is at far left. (Credit: Bill Ingalls \/ NASA) It took nine years for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4418,2840,4809,2174,4810,4709,2848,4004],"class_list":["post-18547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-books","tag-dwarf-planets","tag-nasa-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons-probe","tag-planets","tag-pluto","tag-pluto-flyby"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}