The Eagle-Tribune (Mass.), July 16:
Such is the skill of the scientists and engineers who work for NASA that, after a journey of more than nine years and 3 billion miles, the New Horizons probe arrived July 14 at its close encounter with Pluto 72 seconds ahead of schedule.
Surely, the people who made this deep-space mission possible and who are managing it today deserve a round of applause. The rest of us can take a moment to bask in the glow of national pride. We may have to hitch rides with the Russians to the International Space Station but nobody ”“ nobody ”“ can match our skill with unmanned planetary probes.
New Horizons is the fastest vehicle ever produced by humans. Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006 at a speed of 36,373 mph ”“ fast enough to escape the solar system ”“ the probe reached Jupiter in just 13 months. There, it used the giant planet’s gravity for a course correction and a speed boost. Still under the drag of the sun’s gravity, the probe has slowed a bit. It zipped past Pluto July 14 at roughly 31,000 mph.
New Horizons was built for speed. It lacks the propellant it would need to slow down enough to go into orbit around Pluto. So like the Pioneer and Voyager missions of the 1970s and 1980s, it is a fly-by. New Horizons turned off its communications with Earth Monday night so it could focus on data collection during its 7,200-mile closest approach to Pluto. The probe successfully re-established contact with home on the evening of July 14 and began sending back its data.
New Horizons will continue on to the Kuiper belt, a ring of icy and rocky debris outside the orbit of Neptune left over from the formation of the solar system. The Kuiper belt is the source of some comets ”“ those with orbits that bring them around the sun every 200 years or so. It is also the home of Eris, a recently discovered dwarf planet nearly as large as Pluto. The discovery of Eris in 2005 and its similarity to Pluto helped get the former ninth planet demoted to dwarf planet status.
After investigating any Kuiper belt objects it encounters, New Horizons will eventually join Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in the vast emptiness of interstellar space.
The stunning pictures of Pluto and its moons as well as the reams of data collected will keep planetary scientists working for years.
There are certainly some who question the value of the $700 million mission. But New Horizons has provided us with our one chance to get a clear look at this distant world. We are unlikely to visit Pluto again anytime soon. There are other, more interesting places ”“ such as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn ”“ much closer to home.
The one-time encounter has vastly increased our knowledge of Pluto. For most of the time since its discovery in 1930, Pluto has been little more than a bright speck moving slowly against the background of stars in its 248-year orbit around the sun. More recently, the Hubble Space Telescope had been able to resolve Pluto into a blurry disk. The latest images from New Horizons show previously unimagined features on the surfaces of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. Ice caps, craters, canyons and a mysterious heart-shaped region can be seen
But there’s more value to New Horizons than the collection of scientific data and intriguing pictures. The skill and ingenuity required to execute such a mission are important to maintain. They have value outside the realm of planetary exploration.
And finally, there is the simple satisfaction of exploration itself ”“ a deeply human impulse. New Horizons has indeed lived up to its name, taking mankind somewhere we have never gone before.
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