I had to smile upon seeing the NASA.gov front page this morning. It's a Plutopalooza!
Launched over 9 years ago, NASA space probe New Horizons was scheduled to have its closest fly by of our solar system's dwarf planet Pluto at 4:49 a.m. Pacific time.
By all accounts, the fly by went exactly as planned. Pluto photos weren't sent back instantaneously, but videos of scientists celebrating were immediate!
https://youtu.be/YOfb90vB1jY
During the flyby, the spacecraft was in data-gathering mode, and not in contact with flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. People waiting for news that all systems were still go would have to wait hours more, specifically until just before 6 p.m. Pacific time tonight.
One of the articles I read today pointed out that because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched (traveling at more than 30,000 mph as it passed Pluto), if it collided with a particle as small as a grain of rice, the spacecraft could be incapacitated. Yikes.
As it passed Pluto, New Horizons was about 7,750 miles above the surface, roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India, as a NASA press release pointed out, making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
This whole Pluto flyby thing is such a Big Deal, the White House even sent me, and a whole lot of other people, no doubt, an email about it today. It read ...
"This morning, the United States became the first country to reach Pluto -- and the first country to explore the entire classical solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
NASA's New Horizons interplanetary probe has been making its way to Pluto since January 19, 2006, and has been providing the world with the sharpest photos ever seen of our Solar System's most prominent "dwarf planet." Today, it made its closest approach to Pluto yet -- about 8,000 miles -- at around 07:49:57 EDT.
Here's the photo they took -- which, despite traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), took four and a half hours to reach us here on Earth as it crossed the 3 billion miles between here and Pluto:
That we were able to get so close to Pluto today is a feat whose probability scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson likened to "a hole-in-one on a two-mile golf shot."
He's right.
Every once in a while, a photo comes along that has the ability to shift not just how we see our place in the universe, but how we see ourselves -- not just as Americans, but as citizens of Earth.
This is one of those photos, and I hope you'll share it with someone today.So exciting! What a wonderful day for the United States Space program!
More soon --
John
Dr. John P. Holdren
Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy
The White House
@whitehouseostp
A bit more, from NASA, about the photo above. It was taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 13, when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. "This is the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto on July 14. The color image has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument that was acquired earlier on July 13. This view is dominated by the large, bright feature informally named the “heart,” which measures approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart borders darker equatorial terrains, and the mottled terrain to its east (right) are complex. However, even at this resolution, much of the heart’s interior appears remarkably featureless—possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes," per NASA. (Photo credit: NASA/APL/SwRI)
A mission to Pluto was decades in the making. When Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on Feburary 18, 1930, the stock market had crashed just 4 months before, Mickey Mouse had been on the scene for less than a month, and Herbet Hoover succeeded as president, following Calvin Coolidge.
Below is a photo of the "blink comparator," the machine Clyde Tombaugh used to discover.
I tuned in to NASA TV at 5:30 Seattle time this evening for the "phone home" coverage, when mission control was waiting to receive signals from the spacecraft that it was alive and well, with data on board. Tombaugh's (now elderly) son and daughter were in on hand at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Maryland, for the historic moment. Very cool.
The signals started rolling in right before 6 p.m. Hardware was healthy. Telemetry was good. Data was nominal ... everything checked out and mission control erupted in celebration.
Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Post fly-by, it is estimated it will take around 16 months for New Horizons to beam its backlog of data – 10 years’ worth! - back to Earth. Talk about a long, long distance call!
In a post-phone-home press release, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, "I know today we’ve inspired a whole new generation of explorers with this great success, and we look forward to the discoveries yet to come,” “This is a historic win for science and for exploration. We’ve truly, once again raised the bar of human potential.”
But I have to admit, below is favorite quote of the night. It came from New Horizons' "MOM."
Incidentally, on this day 50 years ago, Mariner 4 flew by Mars, giving us our first close up photos of the Red Planet. We've gone a long way, baby!
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