Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

[Music] good evening everyone my name is Andrew frack no I'm the emeritus chair of astronomy here at Foothill College and it's a pleasure for me to welcome everyone here in the Smithwick auditorium in Los Altos Hills California and everyone watching us on the web around the world to this program in the 18th annual Silicon Valley astronomy lectures this series of outreach lectures which by the way now has over two million views on YouTube is co-sponsored by four organizations the Foothill College astronomy program NASA's Ames Research Center the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the SETI Institute and today we actually had additional help in publicizing the program from the Planetary Society we're very grateful for that this series presents non-technical talks for the beginner on exciting new developments in astronomy and nothing meets those qualifications more than tonight's topic and tonight's speakers as many of you know the new Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto a couple of years ago and sent back remarkable information in pictures from Pluto and is now on its way to see a much smaller object in the zone beyond Neptune which we call the Kuiper belt and tonight's speakers are not only involved in that mission but have written an exciting and well reviewed new book about that mission while chasing New Horizons our speakers are dr. Alan Stern and dr. David Grinspoon let me say just a few things about each of them their resume is so long I can't possibly do justice to all the things they've done and written but let me just tell you that dr. Stern trained both as an engineer and as an astrophysicist he was the science leader of the New Horizons mission and has been involved with over 20 other space missions as well for a time he was the associate administrator at NASA for science missions and he was twice named the Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people he has been the author and editor of six books for the public and has won numerous prizes for his work including the Carl Sagan Memorial Award dr. David Grinspoon who has spoken in this series before is an astrobiologist and an award-winning author and public speaker he held the inaugural chair of astrobiology at the Library of Congress has worked for science museums and institutions of higher learning and has been on the science team for several planetary missions his books include the earth in human hands and Venus revealed ladies and gentlemen talking to us about chasing new horizons inside the epic first mission to Pluto it is a delight and a professional privilege for me to introduce dr. Alan Stern and dr. David Grinspoon thank you very much Andy I'm David I'm gonna talk for a few minutes and Alan will talk for a few minutes and then we'll hear what you want to know and entertain questions and discussion and by the way Andy congratulations on topping two million hits for this series business yes what'd you do with this lecture series is so cool the spreading of the knowledge of space science to the masses of people that are hungry for this inspiring science we we really appreciate the work you've done so thanks for that and I'm really excited to be here tonight with Alan to share a little bit about the story of New Horizons with all of you this is a story that I've been fascinated with for a long time long before there was a mission called New Horizons there was a young a small group of young scientists who had a idea a dream somewhere between an idea and a fantasy that they wanted to send a mission send a spacecraft out to explore the planet Pluto and I've known Alan since really about the time that this quest started in around 1989 and several of the other team members are dear old friends of mine I went to grad school with and and so I followed this story for a long time and I remember thinking many times over the years I cannot believe what these guys are going through to try to make this happen this is gonna make a great book someday I mean seriously years ago I remember thinking that you know especially if they succeed which seemed very unlikely at times then that's going to make a great book because it's such a unlikely story of narrow escapes and doors being slammed in your face and then finding a way to keep going and they started out young and had to really figure out how it works to go from an idea to an actual mission and in telling that story of how they discovered how they figured out how it works I think if we've succeeded in what we set out to do then we reveal to you how it works and that's something we're really proud of because there are a lot of good books about space exploration as many of you know but I don't think there's another book quite like this that sort of peels back those layers and shows you what the people go through and experience and have to navigate in order to get to the point where you've gone from just an idea that you've had with some friends around a table at an Italian restaurant in Baltimore in 1989 to 26 years later a thousand pound space crips craft screaming at 30,000 miles per hour past the planet Pluto and snapping pictures and sending them back home that 26 year journey has a lot of I think fascinating details that most people have never heard and that's what we try to uncover in this book it starts in a way in Oh before I get to where it starts I wanted to share with you one little treasure little a preview of coming attractions this is I had to at least show you one cool picture of Pluto from new horizons because this is where we're going to end up but I couldn't resist jumping ahead because this is what it's all about is the beauty and complexity and wonder of this world which was here to here to for unknown to humankind until the summer of 2015 and in just this one beautiful shot this is one of our favorites you can see just for scale this landscape is that this is about five hundred miles across and you can see there's big mountains there's a lot of topography this has taken about 15 minutes after the closest approach to Pluto so they're starting to look back a little bit towards the Sun so you can see their shadows which really reveals the topography some big mountains over on the right there you can see there's some stuff flowing on the surface there's been motion and active we'll come back to what that is off the horizon you can see there there Hayes's in the atmosphere so there's a lot going on here it's a beautiful planet with a lot of scientific treasures and like I said we'll come back to that but I couldn't resist showing you one teaser image so now let's go back in time to really where the story begins in 1930 with this guy clyde tombaugh an american hero whose story is one that we talk about in the book a little bit and is not well enough known because it's an extraordinary story he was a poor Kansas farm boy during the Depression hard times on the farm was fascinated with astronomy he was an autodidact taught himself out of books from the local library built his own telescopes grounds of lenses and when there was downtime when there wasn't too much work on the farm he would go out at night and observe the sky and make sketches of Mars and Jupiter from what he saw through his telescope and he dreamed that someday he would be an astronomer but he had no plan no ability to comprehend he would ever be able to afford to go to college and actually become a professional astronomer but he took those sketches he made and he mailed him off to observatories around the world like messages in a bottle who knows who will find them and then one day a letter comes to Clyde's farm from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona and it says dear mr. Tombaugh we have seen your sketches we received your sketches of the planet Mars and we're very impressed with your work we are hiring an assistant astronomer would you be interested in the position you know he was and with that Clyde for almost for the first time left Kansas and got in a train with you know with his mother packed him some sandwiches for the journey and he had his astronomy books in his suitcase and he went to Flagstaff Arizona in the mountains of northern Arizona and began a long quest to find what was then called Planet X that a search that Percival Lowell had started a quarter century earlier and nobody had been able to find it and that's what he was hired for and night after night he would go up to the telescope and photograph little patches of sky and then photograph them again a few days later and blink between the two to see if anything was moving in just the right way to indicate an object out beyond the orbit of the then farthest known planet Neptune and he over a year Clyde did this and a lot of senior astronomers told him it was futile he was on a fool's errand it had already been searched for enough there was nothing out there but after more than a year in January 1930 Clyde found something and this is blinking between the nights of January 23rd and January 29th and you can see most of the objects most of those dots are the same between the two nights because those are the stars don't move from night to night but this little flea jumping across the plate from here to here that's what he was looking for it was a faint object moving in just the right way to be orbiting beyond the orbit of Neptune he was pretty sure he'd found it but he went back the next month after the next full moon to search again and it was in exactly the right place and then he knew and for a very short while Clyde Tombaugh was the only person on earth to know about this whole world out there and then he went knocked on the door of his boss and said dr. Slifer I have found your planet X and he had and then they needed to name it and announce it to the world they announced it to the world and then and then suggestions poured in from around the world for what to call this new planet and and we we list some of them in the book you know there were kind of goofy and funny and weird cool suggestions but a really great one came from an 11 year old girl in England a schoolgirl who suggested this name and her father wrote a telegram to Lowell Observatory this this 11 year old girl Venetia Burney suggested that this planet be called Pluto and that was the name they decided to give it and so that's the beginning of this story and one thing that I find a remarkable is that's pretty recent 1930 you know there's still a lot of people alive who are alive when Clyde discovered Pluto it's a it's a story of our time really and this leads us then a couple of decades later into the Space Age and that's sort of the next place our story picks up and we talk about the inspiration that space explorers of our generation at Allen and I both grew up in this time where the Apollo missions were you know the amazing thing that was happening and we were kids and seeing that on television Neil and Buzz you know hopping onto the moon that was mind-blowing and a lot of space scientists of our generation will tell you that that was the moment that you know something clicked and they we got set on a on a trajectory also happening that same decade were the first missions to the other planets to a lot of the other planets and that was mind-blowing for a kid in the 60s and 70s for instance this is the spacecraft Mariner 4 which was the first successful flyby that returned pictures of the planet Mars like this one here and that was amazing seeing that there were planets there were spacecraft going to planets for the first time and the first time you get to a new planet it's always a flyby and a flyby is a particular kind of exciting discovery because it's in a moment in a few hours a planet goes from this blurry thing that you've seen in telescopes and know very little about too this place that you are all of a sudden seen up close it's it's a burst of Revelation there's nothing like the first flyby of a planet there there are a lot of cool kinds of missions orbiters Landers Rovers you know that are neat in different ways but a first flyby it just packs this this world of discovery into into a day into a few hours when the spacecraft goes screaming past and by the way this flyby of Mariner 4 by Mars returning the first close-up pictures of Mars happened on July 14 1965 now remember that date it'll become significant a little bit later this evening in August of 1970 this issue of National Geographic was published and Allen remembers this I remember this a lot of a lot of kids our age remember this because it it had this cover story voyage to the planets and on the cover you can see there was this artist's depiction of Saturn as seen from Titan it had to be an artist depiction because nobody had seen Saturn close up and we know now Titan doesn't look like this but it was a reasonable guess at the time and this story voids to the planets it talked about the planetary missions that had already happened in the 1960s the early missions to Mars and Venus and Mercury well no mercury didn't really happen until the early 70s right after this but but the first planetary missions and it profiled the the first generation of planetary explorers that had pictures and stories about Carl Sagan and and and some of his colleagues and it just seemed like the coolest thing in the world that people were actually doing this for a living exploring new planets and in that same issue of National Geographic you know they were talking about the missions to come in the 1970s and 1980s and then there was a chart that summarized what was known about all the planets one for each planet and then boxes that told you summarize the information known their orbits what temperature they are what their a doubt of how big they are although all the facts about each planet and over in the far right of this of this chart of this the this a table there was a column for Pluto and underneath Bluto all the boxes said question mark question mark question mark question mark it was a mystery world and it really stood out in comparison to the other planets and in this issue it was the place we knew nothing about and that opened the door for a lot of interesting kind of lore and fantasy and speculation about Pluto and there was some fun science fiction from that period from the 70s and 80s and Pluto was always this kind of you know outpost planet the farthest outposts the Gateway to to the Stars or in some stories Pluto had mysterious alien artifacts because the fact is a place that you know nothing about is you're free to speculate wildly and you're not contradicting any known facts so Pluto was a good you know sort of it was a blank slate on which we could inscribe our fantasies but there was the also the idea that maybe we could change that and in that same National Geographic issue they talked about this opportunity that was coming up in the 1970s for a grand tour mission a mission concept they called the Grand Tour the idea was if the planets lined up just right which it turns out they only do every 180 years then you could launch from Earth and swing by Jupiter and do a gravity assist by Jupiter where you use Jupiter's gravitational pull to fling you on toward Saturn and then you go to Saturn and you use Saturn's gravity to fling you towards Uranus and you can go to Neptune and maybe on out to Pluto and it just so happened that in later in the 1970s the planets were going to be lined up in just that way that we could do a grand tour and then it wouldn't be that way again for another 180 years and that was actually if you think about it kind of an amazing stroke of luck if you think of the species on earth getting to the point where they've got the technology and the ability to launch spacecraft off of the planet in the 1960s and then the very next decade this sort of gateway to the outer solar system is going to open up which only happens once every two hundred years so that was sort of lucky but then there was the question will we be able to mount such a mission and take advantage of the Grand Tour trajectory and there was some drama there but ultimately that turned into the Voyager mission and Voyager was this incredible adventure launched in 1977 there's one of the voyagers there were two of them got to Jupiter in 79 Saturn in 80 and 81 Uranus in 86 and Neptune in 89 and for those of us who were young students and young scientists in that era the Voyager encounters were amazing because they were these first flybys of of these planets and all these moons were you know just these bursts of discovery and there was sort of one every few years so during the 70s and 80s you can always count on you know there being another Voyager encounter coming up in a few years where the the tribe of planetary scientists would gather at JPL in Pasadena and and and another wonderful encounter would happen but then in 1989 with the Neptune encounter it was all over a Neptune was the last place last planet Voyager 2 visited and this is one of the last pictures of a crescent Neptune because you're leaving Neptune and looking back towards the Sun and off the edge of a crescent Neptune you can see a crescent Triton and Triton was one of the last places Voyager uncovered for Humanity and Triton is an amazing place one of the best places Voyager explored an icy moon of Neptune that in some ways is actually very Pluto like it's roughly the same size on the surface there's nitrogen ice and methane ice there's geological activity that was surprising there were geysers there's a thin atmosphere and Triton was was just wonderful in it wetted a lot of people's appetites to start wondering about Pluto and wondering about other icy worlds out there but there was something sad about the Voyager Neptune encounter because it was the last one and for a while it seemed like maybe it was all going to be over was that going to be our last ever encounter with a new planet in the solar system our last first flyby there was something poignant about it but this is where my co-author Allen Stern enters the story because right around that time of the last of the net Voyager Neptune flyby in 1989 Allen fresh out of grad school was thinking about the possibility of sending a mission to Pluto he and a small group of cohorts asked why do we have to stop here we we sort of missed out on on Voyager you know those of us right around that time Allen and others who were just getting their PhDs around then what's our mission what's our Voyager how can we keep going and explore new places and they started to talk about a Pluto mission but at first it was a very unlikely idea and they had to really fight an uphill battle with a lot of surprising twists and turns and and I'm going to bring Alan on in just a second to tell you more about that but first I have to embarrass him for a second with one image this is a young Alan Stern with in fact his first scientific instrument and you'll notice that here he's he's looking down but soon after this he decided that he what he really wanted to do with his scientific instruments was was look up and he's still doing that and right now it's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague and co-author dr. Alan Stern [Applause] okay great thank you very much David when we first put this presentation together David surprised me by where did he come up with a slide so I really couldn't stand it so I thought I would come up with a slide of David right here almost as young but you notice he's not with his first scientific instrument but he is with his first scientific Minter Carl Sagan who was his father's best friend they were both young professors at Harvard David grew up with Carl in the house it's not a surprise that he's such a spectacular writer and has done such amazing books like Venus revealed earth and human hands and now chasing new horizons so I want to tell you a little bit more about this story and I want to start off with what we call in the book the Pluto files or the Pluto underground this is a committee which I chaired when I was about 12 years old in the early 1990s when we all dressed funny and wore neckties or most everybody some people were ahead of their time but this is a committee called the outer planet science working group which was charged with examining how various ways we could go about flying missions to go explore Pluto back in 1989 I had been drafted with from this Pluto underground group to March up to NASA headquarters and ask a man named Jeff Briggs who ran the planetary exploration program if we could get a study together of how to send a spacecraft back all the way out there where Voyager had gone and even further and we did that I was the study scientist for it it was called something called Pluto 350 you'll read all about it in the book and was quite a revolutionary study for its time but then following that NASA got serious they made this outer planet science working group and started putting more money into more development of the ideas behind how you could go about doing that as it turned out this is a picture taken in 1991 April of 1991 we had no idea what was Stauber we had had a pretty easy start briggs said yes briggs put some money out there the Jet Propulsion Laboratory down in Los Angeles and a science team that I had formed got together we produced the study it showed that it was feasible and then this group got formed but what we had no idea was that it was going to be another 12 years before NASA would start actually funding the mission to Pluto in year after year fashions would change try a really big mission to Pluto try a really tiny mission to Pluto try and do it without nuclear power which is impossible to go that far from the Sun and use solar arrays try this try that we had many reversals we had dead ends we had blind alleys we tried going to Russia to get free launch vehicles we we did this is before Russia was off the table like it is today and the book spins perhaps 50 or 60 pages and tells you about this crazy maze we were in in Washington politics where we always felt like this right we were Charlie Brown and Lucy was constantly stealing the football sometimes a study was poorly managed sometimes the results had too much it cost too much they tried to pack too much in sometimes it was just an infeasible dream of building a spacecraft that was so tiny that no one could possibly make a mission like that all the way to the outer solar system and other things happen they came out of the blue in 1993 a mission was approaching Mars called Mars Observer four days from reaching the target it blew up just went off the air exploded literally and NASA decided that they should take that money which it was just about to be first new start to fund a Pluto mission and replace that spacecraft for Mars which they did so it was Lucy and the football all through the 90s and the thing about that and the book brings it out I think pretty well for the people who worked on this it took a lot of stamina determination and drive it took persistence it's not so bad when the first time it didn't work out you know you said well we need to try something else and the second time it doesn't work out you say well you know third time's the charm except I got to be the sixth seventh eighth ninth and I have now said more than once that if Pluto missions have been a cat they'd have been dead long ago yeah that's only get nine lives but eventually something very important happened and that was the discovery of the solar system's third zone so in this diagram the white ovals are the orbits of the giant planets the Sun is in the middle the planets like Earth and Mars their orbits are so close to the Sun you can't see them in this diagram now inner circle is Jupiter's orbit then Saturn Uranus and Neptune the yellow one is Pluto and when Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto he and others went looking what else might be out there and the distant reaches of the solar system couldn't find a thing and they looked in the 30s and the 40s in the 50s and the 60s the technology got better they looked in the 70s in the 80s he couldn't find a thing out that far just Pluto it seemed like a misfit didn't look like a giant planet didn't look like one of the rocky terrestrial planets but then the floodgates opened in the 90s with much better computer technology to actually scour images and with see CDs instead of plates instead of photographic technology one object orbiting out there beyond Neptune in an orbit not that different from Pluto's was discovered in 1992 made the cover of nature the next year four more were discovered in 1994 another ten and by the end of the decade more than a thousand they formed the solar system's third zone this belt or disk of material we call the Kuiper belt after Gerard Kuiper who most famously predicted its existence way back in 1950 and 51 now this belt is the source of all the short period comets in our solar system but more importantly it revolutionized our knowledge of the geography of our solar system we used to think of the terrestrial planets like Venus and Mercury and Mars and the earth as the inner solar system now that we still do we thought of the giant planets Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune as the outer solar system we call Voyager and outer planets mission with the discovery of the Kuiper belt it was realized that the giant planet region is really the middle solar system this is the true outer solar system it this region is larger and and I don't think this diagram does it justice it's actually larger than everything from Neptune down to the Sun by a factor of seven it completely dominates the architecture of the solar system in addition to all those comets and somewhat larger objects the size of counties or New England states that we call planetesimals that our building blocks of larger objects we started to find objects close to Pluto size small planets and today they have names like Ixion and how maiya and Sedna and Eris and so forth there are a dozen of them that are now known this is a fundamental paradigm shift in our field is we realize there was a third class of planet in the solar system and at that class a planet the small ones the size of continents on the earth but not the size of the earth actually dominate the the planetary population of our solar system there are more small planets in the Kuiper belt then all of the four giant planets and four terrestrial planets combined and with that realization the National Academy of Sciences rocketed the the priority to go to Pluto to the very top of the list in 2003 because you see then beyond just studying the fascinating system the Pluto system with all of its interesting properties Pluto represented an archetype for this entire new class of planet and so by going to Pluto we could not just explore Pluto but begin to explore the third zone of the solar system and this new type of planet and with that came the money to actually build the spacecraft and NASA held the competition it was very steep there were five teams that each wrote proposals about this thick like an old New York City phonebook with engineering designs scientific instrument designs cost and management and schedule how to carry out the entire project five teams competed NASA narrowed it down to two we were one of the two the new horizons team and ultimately the new horizons team which is we described in the in the story was really the David in a David versus Goliath battle because the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was our opponent in this and they had done all the exploration of the planets previously our team had much less experience but we wrote a better proposal and NASA selected us and this is the spacecraft that we built new horizons we were selected in November of 2001 and we were really challenged because although we were approved to go and do it there we needed to use Jupiter as a gravity assist to fly to Pluto and there was only one remaining Jupiter gravity assist in the entire decade of the 2000s and somewhere between God and mr. Newton you know that schedule was fixed in January of 2006 there was a three-week launch window and if you miss it you wait about a decade to fly it again so we had to build that spacecraft to design it and build it and test it and have it on a rocket and ready in four years in two months which is lightning speed for a project like this the boy juice or eight or ten years development and to make matters even tougher the budget that NASA allocated for the New Horizons team to do new New Horizons was one-fifth two dimes on the dollar compared to Voyager so we had severe schedule challenges we had to figure out how to do this more than twice as fast and for five times less money when we won I got a lot of congratulations but I got a lot of phone calls from colleagues that said you won but you lost because you're gonna work on this you're gonna work seven days a week you're gonna work your heart out you and your team and somewhere along the road you're not going to be able to meet schedule you're not gonna be able to meet cost you it's gonna get canceled it's too too high a bar you'll never make it to the launch pad and it'll be a stain on your career for the rest of your your life that was just great anyway that's not what happened the New Horizons team actually buckled down made some compromises figured out how to do this more quickly and much less expensively and actually produced this spacecraft here's a picture of New Horizons in Florida at the launch site in a cleanroom in late 2005 barely a month before we put it on the launch vehicle and I just want to give you a little little quick tour of the spacecraft there's some people for scale it's a very small spacecraft and intentionally so because by building a small lightweight spacecraft weighing only about a thousand pounds about the size of a baby grand piano and putting it on the biggest rocket anyone would sell us you could get the fastest speed to cross the solar system in the least amount of time and that was our objective now inside this spacecraft inside the box if you will we call it a bus inside of there are all the systems that you need for the journey guidance systems propulsion systems thermal control power distribution main computer communications guidance computers all that and we carry two of each because we only have the money to build one spacecraft this is not Voyager 1 & 2 where there's a backup there's no chance for a redo something breaks we need to have backup systems onboard so there are two transmitters and two sets of thrusters in every direction to guidance computers to star trackers two sets of gyros and on down the list almost everything on board except for structure and this funny-looking hair curler is twinned and it all fits in this small package up top is a dish antenna a little bigger than six feet across that's our we call it the high gain antenna but it's our dish to communicate back to the earth to transmit and to receive and then this thing that does look like a hair curler is actually a nuclear power generator called an RTG stands for radioisotope thermoelectric generator it's fueled with plutonium radioactive plutonium which by the way was discovered in 1938 or 39 and was named for the planet Pluto it's true back in the 30s they had a fashion you know they're naming elements for planets uranium neptunium plutonium etc so we actually sent plutonium back to Pluto thank you the way this works is that you bottle it up in this black cylinder you bottle up the plutonium it's generating about five kilowatts of heat and through clever thermal design the inside of this skin is very hot with that five kilowatt heater going on but these fins that are radiators cause the outside of the skin to be very cold near absolute zero and if you put thermocouples across the temperature gradient it drives a little current it's not very efficient only six percent efficient so the five kilowatts turns into about 250 watts of DC electricity that has to run all the systems on board I bet you each of these lights is probably more than 200 Watts right this is three garden-variety lightbulbs to run everything including the seven scientific instruments but this is the spacecraft we built we did do it on cost we did do it on schedule if this was November 2005 the launch window is now six or eight weeks in the future and we head it all together it's a little bit more detail on the spacecraft but I think I've said most of the things that are here so let me move right along and say that as we were getting ready to fly there was one more thing that we wanted to do back in the 90s when we were first studying how to fly a mission to Pluto Clyde Tombaugh was still alive the man that discovered Pluto he knew that plans were afoot and people were dreaming about how to go all the way back out there and study his planet but he died in January of 1997 at the age of 91 years old before he died he had said to some of us working on on those studies you know if you ever get this together and there's a way to do it I'd like to have my ashes of aboard that spacecraft and so it got to be 2005 and it was looking pretty likely that we could pull this off and so I called his widow Patsy up and had a kind of a delicate conversation and asked if Clyde had maybe ever mentioned that he might like to fly to Pluto he'd said that weather maybe what had he been buried or or where their ashes there were would the family like us to do that they would very much and they sent those to my office in Boulder Colorado and I put them in my briefcase and I flew out to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab where the spacecraft was being built and had a meeting of our engineers and I said now how are we going to do this we've got to get this aboard the spacecraft it's a late addition they said oh this is easy we'll make a balanced weight out of it and we'll replace one of the balanced weight with Clyde's ashes you know the engineers there's never everything's gotta have a purpose it's fully engineered so that's what they did we put it in this little cylinder and then I wrote an inscription that that's on it and I can't read it from this far back it says interned here in are the remains of American Clyde W Tom bough discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's thirds own Adele and miron's boy Patricia's husband Annette and Aldens father astronomer teacher punster and friend Clyde W Tom bow and his dates 1906 to 1997 and we launched him to the stars just barely a month later pretty amazing now every spaceflight requires a team of people space flights a team sport you don't know this most of you don't know this but 2500 Americans work to build New Horizons its launch vehicle and its nuclear power supply mostly worked in anonymity imagine that 2500 men and women did this project and you never heard about it but that teamwork is what got us there all these people were working to see America fly this mission at breakthrough cost all the way out to the edge of the solar system to explore the last of the classical planets known at the birth of the Space Age America had been first to every planet in the solar system not in this order but all the way from Mercury closest to the Sun all the way up to Neptune there was a little unfinished business at Pluto in fact back in 1991 we were first working on this the post office wanted to commemorate the success of all those early explorations in Voyager just finished so they issued a set of nine stamps for the exploration of the planets and they had the first mission that had explored each planet Mariner 4 to Mars as David said Mariner 2 to Venus Mariner 10 to mercury pioneer 10 to Jupiter so forth and so on and a picture of each planet from those first missions except for Pluto and to have an artist's conception and it just said Pluto not explored it was pretty lame but it became a bit of a rallying cry so in fact in addition to Clyde's ashes I also had us paste one of those stamps on the spacecraft the fly it in Pluto's face and get it cancelled that's true now after we launched we didn't need 2500 people we didn't have to build a big launch vehicle or a spacecraft we didn't have to have all those test facilities we didn't need a crew to build nuclear power generators and after launch it necked down it went from like running New York City to being mayor of Hooterville it's 50 people less people than just in this one section for the science team the engineering team the flight control team the project management the public affairs people everybody just 50 bellybuttons this is a picture of the flight team taken just two weeks after the flyby of Pluto we're in a pretty good mood can you tell right but I wanted to show this picture because it's all about teamwork and spaceflight and I also want to use this opportunity to tell you that some people who worked on New Horizons as science team members on the NASA side on the project management even on the educator public outreach side are in this room with us tonight and I'd like them to stand up would you please all stand up if you if you're part of the New Horizons team don't be shy Ross thank you everybody whoops we don't want to do that open can back that up I sure hope I could back that up anyway so thank you very much for that an amazing effort by our entire team to build this space craft and get it to the launch pad and then to fly it across three billion miles of space flawlessly I doubt I'm trying but I wanted to back up and show one slide well let me just say this what was on that slide I want to talk about this launch vehicle the Atlas 5 this is the Atlas 551 it's the most powerful launch vehicle that was then available in the u.s. inventory and to make our journey to Pluto as fast as possible we completely tricked it out we bought every upgrade every option the most number of solid rocket boosters the lightest weight nose cone we put a special purpose third stage nobody had ever loaded up there before really it was it was amazing and particularly for me you know I was a kid that built test this model rockets and with mow lawns and and and and wash cars so that I get bigger and bigger rockets you have no idea how much fun it was to order this band and and that nose cone it's 70 feet high and it's built to launch moving van cise spy satellites and and space telescopes and here we put little New Horizons in it about twice the size of this podium and I remember going in that nose cone we're launching this baby empty which of course was the purpose right it was just I took the calling new horizons the hood ornament on the Atlas and then on our third launch attempt and we walked through that whole story in chasing New Horizons we actually launched it on Thursday the 19th of January 2006 and hopefully we can play this video but it might just be stuck ah it's gonna work there we go so this is 224 feet tall it's as big as a skyscraper in the city downtown San Francisco can we turn the sound down a little bit now watch how fast this skyscraper she gets off the watch man it's gonna reach that cloud deck two miles high in about 15 seconds you've never been to a launch of something like this you really need to take time and go to Florida and do it because you can't do the acoustics justice by being here now watch it there it is in the clouds two miles high downtown building and in under 30 seconds this monster went supersonic over images we have seven rocket engines all firing in tandem five solid rocket motors two liquid propulsion engines to take this baby up to hypersonic speed now shortly the solid rocket motors are going to run out of fuel and then they're just dead weight so we want to cast them away so the vehicle can accelerate faster and that's what you're gonna see right here you'll see two separate in a moment later the other three there you go two three now we're free of all that dead weight and the sustainer liquid propulsion system can really now start hauling the mail because the job is to get this whole stack up to orbit in about eight minutes going 2,000 miles an hour and in fact we're already at spaced altitudes I haven't been talking for more than 90 seconds and we can shed the nosecone now because we don't need it or a bubble the air and there it goes and behind that cloud and that was the last anyone ever saw of New Horizons we've been flying it for 12 and a half years we've never seen it ever since we just talked to it by radio and we flew across the solar system that's easy to say but it took almost a decade now this was a really fast spacecraft the fastest spacecraft ever launched how many people here remember that when Apollo missions launched to the moon 25,000 miles an hour it took three days to get to the moon right New Horizons did that in nine hours we defy almost a million miles every day we do that seven days a week in 52 weeks a year 13 months after we launched we were at Jupiter 4 that gravity assist half a billion miles away previous spacecraft to do that job had taken four to six years we did it in one year and one month and during that one year in one month we were super busy because we had to completely check out all the spacecraft systems all the backup systems and then commission all seven scientific instruments get them calibrated navigate to the aim point at Jupiter that took us to Pluto because if we don't go to that aim point we're going somewhere else in a hurry but it's not going to be a Pluto mission anymore and then at the same time we had to plan a Jupiter flyby because this was our only chance to be the only thing we passed along the way so we wanted to test all the flight software and all the flight systems to work out all the bugs so that Pluto we only learned about Pluto not our spacecraft it seemed like a good plan so we did that and we flew past Jupiter in which one is it February of 2007 and then launched on an eight year crossing of this ocean of space from Jupiter to Pluto two and a half billion miles with a be like Carl Sagan used to say William right traveling almost a million miles a day and I know people used to ask us on the team what do you do well the spacecraft is you know and I hear it's hibernating what do you got you're waiting is your board must be terrible just waiting and waiting and waiting that wasn't the case at all because we only had these 50 people and yet we had to do the same work with the Voyager team they had 450 people and we had to plan the flyby of Pluto down to the detail what flyby altitude which day we're gonna arrive on which satellites were gonna fly by which instruments look at which targets in the system at which time how we operate them which modes what commands to send where to store the data which recorder to put it on and a hundred other details is its fit within the power budget there's thermal conditions on the spacecraft right that we have time to make the turn to that target it's a huge huge complicated game and all the while we had to take care of the spacecraft and train the team for the flyby and right malfunction procedures for over a hundred and sixty possible problems we might have to deal with in Mission Control and along the way we started finding that Pluto had not just one satellite that had been known when we started building it but a second a third a fourth and a fifth and as a result we started worrying about hazards because those small satellites could generate rings in principle and we're flying through the system at 32,000 miles an hour if we were struck by a single pellet the size of a rice pellet whether it's made of ice or rock game over it would shred the spacecraft so we had to design a program of imaging as we approach the planet to look for hazards then we had to have on the shelf three other flybys at different distances from Pluto all ready to go because there's no time to develop them if you have to do a divert maneuver and so our team over those nine years was working round the clock Alice Bowman who I'll show you a picture of shortly Alice Bowman who ran Mission Operations called it a nine-year sprint right I can't tell you how many meetings I went to where they said there's too much work meanwhile my parents and everybody else were asking what are you doing aren't you bored is not still seven years do you get there anyway we did do all that this is Alice Bowman she's the mission's mom that stands for Mission Operations Manager well you're laughing every every robotic spacecraft of the planets has a Mission Operations Manager and they're always called the mom whether it's a man or a woman how many people here saw Apollo 13 the movie almost everybody that's good okay you remember the part that Edie Harris played in Mission Control he was the flight director the boss of Mission Control with the flattop and the vest right that's Alice's job she ran our Mission Control she still does she's been on the project since we wrote the proposal she designed it or her team designed it they wrote all the software to drive the spacecraft and their Mission Control during the years we were developing the project and she has led the flight of New Horizons across the solar system and she's got a team of men and women about 50/50 that are the flight controllers and the engineers that operate this interplanetary spacecraft now 10 days before we got to Pluto this team was tested in a way that few teams are it was July the 4th 2015 a holiday we had given almost everybody the day off but that morning we had launched the long command load that went up to the spacecraft with the sequence for the flyby that was supposed to begin in three days took four and a half hours the speed of light for that command load to cross the solar system and then four and a half hours later as the signal was coming back to earth reporting how well that went in terms of storing all that data with no warning the spacecraft went offline we're getting ones and zeros and ones and zeros an inch and they checked as if something happened to the antenna station in Australia did they move the antenna did they have a failure and the receivers none of that the spacecraft had gone offline immediately the first thing you do in that situation is you start calling everybody on the team my cellphone rang is a project manager I knew he was at a barbecue it's probably not telling calling to tell me how good that sauce is why is he calling pick up the phone Allen we've lost contact with a spacecraft now we're thirty three hundred days out of the box we've been flying for three thousand three hundred and some odd days things had never gone bad on us and today ten days before Pluto flyby you know all of a sudden we lost contact with a spacecraft when that happened that one going to Mars they never heard from it again this is a very serious situation I said Glenn I'll meet you in Mission Control in four minutes later I was there I did drive the car across campus flashed my badge go through security upstairs to Mission Control when I got there people were already coming in from their picnics and their family activities so this is a high-tech Mission Control and people coming in and flip-flops and tank tops and you know crazy t-shirts and all this and they didn't know it but none of them were gonna leave for days it was just like in Apollo 13 the movie remember they were sleeping on desks and they were eating from the candy machines and all that that's what happened here because what we found when we got communication back with the spacecraft is that main computer had been overloaded and this whole story is told in great detail in our book in fact the book opens with me getting a phone call ten days from Pluto and we lose the spacecraft and we don't tell you how it ends until much later in the book after we tell you about Clyde Tombaugh and you know why we have a mission to Pluto and the whole challenge of raising the funding and building the mission competition flying it across the solar system and we found out that when we switch to the backup side all of the files that instructed the spacecraft how to do the flyby have been erased just like when your computer goes blue screen and you bring it back up in that word file you've been working on it's gone right and we had been putting various files up on the spacecraft in the memory since December it's July 6 months been loading up pointing files and ephemeris files and orbit files for each of the satellites and the big instruction load for how to do the flyby and they're all gone dozens of files we've been doing this for months and now we've got three days we had 78 hours until flyby begins to figure out how to put it all back to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and obviously you know because you've seen the cover of our book is a very nice picture of Pluto we figured it out these guys went round the clock and figured out how to repeat those six months of work and the stakes were very high because every time we'd have to we'd want to send instructions to the spacecraft there's this nine hour round trip bite time so you're making these chess moves nine hours at a time there aren't that many nine-hour cycles per day are there in only three days and believe it or not they did it flawlessly and got us back on line and rejoined the original timeline with four hours to go they ought to make a movie so credit to Alice and her team let's see if David's slide there we go I want to talk to you about navigation in order to do the science of New Horizons there were some very stringent requirements on the spacecraft in terms of navigating to the planet first we had a very high priority objective studying Pluto's atmosphere and to do that we had to fly through the shadow so this is the intended spacecraft trajectory these are the orbits of the satellites the reason that their up-and-down vertical is because Pluto's pole like Uranus's is actually tipped on its side so we came at the system perpendicular and we're aiming to fly through that shadow in order to do that we had to fly through one little window in space that's 40 by 60 miles that's a big barn door that's the size of the Bay Area isn't it except it doesn't look very big from 3 to 3 billion miles away back at Earth right and somebody actually did the math for us around the time of the flyby and it works out to a hole-in-one from LA to New York City and our navigation team did that in fact they flew us right down the middle of the quarter it's just an amazing job and we were taking images on the way in and comparing where Pluto was to where it should be against the star fields and computing the difference and burn solutions for the engines for how to correct back on a course and we were homing in the whole way but it wasn't just that we had to fly through this window in space we also had to know what time it was we had written this entire program which was dependent upon knowing where each satellite and the planet was at every moment in time as we walked through the system so that we could point the cameras because we're pointing blind and the targets better show up in the field of view not half of it or an empty frame but exactly in and they calculated for us that to do that we had to arrive within 450 seconds of the intended time that was set at launch after nine and a half years and we did it New Horizons arrived at Pluto 86 seconds off the intended time after that nine and a half year journey 86 that gets Burleigh now David and I just flew in to SFO Airport from Houston Texas a four hour flight and it was much more than nine and a half minutes off schedule so that's a pretty good feat to do that after nine and a half years and they completely pulled it off and I don't know how many of you might have been at the flyby but for our team it was unbelievable thousands of people and David describes us in the book thousands of people came to be at the flyby and literally politicians and rock stars were showing up and movie stars and the the highest NASA brass and it just became kind of a Woodstock event for science well - mud and drugs but it was what it was really an amazing confluence of people literally thousands of people descended on on Mission Control and and stayed there and the whole thing was put on the web and an unbelievable response two billion web hits in 24 hours I promised my mom was less than half but we had 200 press show up NASA hadn't seen anything like this since the days of Apollo and Voyager because people love exploration and these are scenes from Mission Control you can see it's it's kind of bedlam in some of the scenes and even better when we found out that it all worked it was crazy emotional here this is a scene in Mission Control just moments after Alice had gotten the telemetry report that everything had worked the memories were full of data on Pluto we were outbound from the Pluto system and I had been back in this room observing Mission Control with the NASA Administrator and I just couldn't resist it was time for a hug but it was more than that just that this is a picture of our science team that morning a few hours before when the first high-resolution image of Pluto was cast up on the big screen 5:00 a.m. and here are people many of them had worked 15 years some people in the project like me have worked 26 years to see this this dream we had come true to be a part of something larger than life to explore the farthest worlds in the history of humankind to be the first these this new zone of the solar system this new type of planet and look at the emotion in that room they'll dill Cruikshank was there Rossmeyer was there a couple of other people in this audience I think Dennis bogan was there and you know there were fist bumps and there were hugs there were people jumping up and down there were tears there were shouts there were high-fives it was everything you could imagine because it had all come together and perfectly we did over 450 observations in Pluto system after we got all the data back on the ground every single one perfectly correct not a single one had a problem so I want to show you a little bit of what we brought home let's start with a family portrait Pluto and some of its satellites right here there's Pluto for scale if if San Francisco was here on the western limb go all the way across to the eastern limb that's somewhere in Ohio so this is a pretty big place you wouldn't walk across it it's got about as much surface area as the entirety of the United States including Alaska this is the biggest satellite share and the one discovered from the ground in the 70s these are two of the four smaller satellites Nix and Hydra they're called and then there are two more Kerberos and Styx are not in this family portrait but they're shown here here are all four of the small satellites that orbit the binary the the two big guys in order of their distance from Pluto Styx his closest hydras farthest and all of these were named in the mythology of the underworld that Pluto is named after I know a lot of people think this was just for a bad 70s rock band not true yeah we learned a lot about these guys really they were just points of light before the flyby but we fingerprinted their composition with our spectrometers we can see geology and the highest resolution images we can see interesting color variations on the surface we've in an indirect way measured their masses we can infer their densities by knowing their volumes and really nothing was known about them to speak up beforehand except their orbits and here they are compared to the big satellite Charon for size so but they're not the star of the show the star of the show is this strange binary planet called Pluto Charon Pluto in the front much brighter and more colorful because it's got all these interesting ices on the surface made of nitrogen and methane and carbon monoxide and at the relevant temperatures they can actually move around the surface and through the atmosphere and make for complex seasonal cycles and then the kind of dullard sister Sharon in the background which is much darker and less colorful by a long shot a little bit more about Sharon here this is a close-up everything you're looking at just about everything here is just water ice the entire surface and in fact 50% of the mass of Sharon is just water ice see all these craters we can use these craters to date the age of the surface and if you don't know how that's done it's actually conceptually very simple it's imagine it was raining outside and we went outside with a piece of paper the longer you leave it out in the rain the more dots will appear well it's raining impactors in the Kuiper belt and the longer you leave a surface out in that rain of impactors the more craters will have accumulate so a more heavily cratered surface more heavily cratered surface is older and if you can't find craters it's must be very young so it turns out this surface is 4 and 1/2 billion years old basically as old as the solar system meaning that Sharon after its formation quit evolving very early and it's just been out there in the rain of impactors there are other interesting things all the way across the equator here's the North Pole all the way across the equator is a big Canyon system that geologists call an extensional tectonic belt Rossmeyer raise your hand just submitted a paper about this it apparently what happened is the interior was warm with water liquid water when it first formed and as it cooled off the water froze if your kid does that like puts a glass of water in the freezer and leaves it there what happens two things first the water expands it breaks the glass the kid gets punished in this case the water expanded and it broke to relieve the stress for over a thousand miles across this equator it's the biggest or one of the biggest canyon systems in the solar system much bigger than the Grand Canyon now in addition there are all kinds of other interesting things there are mountains that look like they've sunk down into moats there's a polar cap that's like a science fiction polar cap it's not a big bright white polar cap like the earth or Mars or anything you've ever seen before it's like an anti polar cap of course it's a it's from the underworld this material this red stuff we believe and we published a paper on this in nature is material that has escaped flows atmosphere and as it's flowing away run into Charon and at the poles where it's coldest it sticks it cold traps out and then as the sunlight shines on it makes chemical reactions to turn the methane it's primarily methane that's escaping into long-chain hydrocarbons that have just this color in just the same spectrum as this material has we can reproduce that in laboratories and we have done that to show that it matches and there's a lot more than I could tell you about Charon but it's getting late in the hour so I want to go on to the star of the show Pluto this is an image that was created actually it's it's a it's a view as if you were an astronaut standing above Pluto a thousand kilometres about 600 miles looking down on the surface here's a true color picture of the hemisphere we flew by and in the green box I'm showing you where on the planet we're looking this is basically the heart of Pluto it's the Western lobe of that heart again North is always to the top this enormous white feature is that Western lobe of the heart it is a nitrogen glacier of unprecedented scale there is no glacier of this size anywhere in the solar system that's ever been seen except on earth and of course on earth the glaciers are made of water ice not nitrogen and on that glacier there we have not been able to find a single crater right next to it they're very heavily cratered terrains the date as old as Charon surface - four billion years old this system this glacier which as David said is flowing we see evidence of avalanches of subduction under mountains of convection of swirl currents as it maneuvers around obstacles of water ice this system is the scale of Texas and Oklahoma combined and apparently it was created yesterday geologically because we can't find a single crater we can't really get a precise age but it can't be more than a few million years old the planet is 4,500 million years old so this really was born yesterday there's lots of other complexity big canyon systems and mountain ranges that ring the glacier the tower 15,000 feet into the sky they're made of water us not rock mountains made of ice this is one of my favorite pictures it's an area to the west of where we were just looking with mountain ranges about the size of the Rocky Mountains in my home state of Colorado and these mountains are just about as tall - they're three to four kilometers high 14,000 therefore teeners and what's what's most enchanting about these is that they're they have snow caps this little planet in the Kuiper belt has snow caps it's just amazing except this snow isn't made of water ice it looks like water ice it looks very familiar at the crest of all the mountains is this bright white stuff but our spectrometers have fingerprinted it it's methane it's natural gas condensed natural gas now we knew that methane was common on Pluto weirsdale Cruikshank there's Dale Dale discovered methane on Pluto in 1976 with two of his colleagues it's all over the planet apparently it accumulates at high altitude as snow caps on the mountain ranges what a sci-fi world Pluto turned out to be now here's an image a lot like David showed you I love this this one was taken just a few minutes after the other one maybe 20 minutes after flyby and you can see how rugged that terrains are on Pluto's surface this feature we believe is a volcanic caldera the size of Mauna lower that spews ice from time to time not lava you can see these concentric haze layers in the atmosphere that stretch up half a million feet into the sky above Pluto and you can see the big nitrogen glacier and a lot more detail it's really an amazing success story no one thought we could convince NASA to fund a mission to Pluto and then then when there was funding and there was a competition no one thought that the new horizons team would be the winners of that competition and when we won people said you won but you lost but we built it and we launched it successfully and we flew it all the way across the solar system and I'm going to end with my favorite picture of the entire flyby this is a true color picture looking back at Pluto Pluto sky is blue just like the Earth's there you see it remember I talked about the navigation challenges and how one of the scientific objectives is to fly through Pluto's shadow so we could use the ultraviolet spectrometer to determine the composition of the atmosphere this image was taken while we were in Pluto's shadow looking back the Sun is on the other side of the planet the sunlight is filtering through Pluto's atmosphere the entire disk of the planet is plunged in darkness because this is the night side the reason I love this picture more than any other is because the only way you can get this geometry the only way you can see Pluto this way silhouetted against the Sun is to be on the far side of Pluto this is the image that says we did it we really did it thank you very much David come on back up it's really beautiful isn't it Thank You Alan I'm just gonna make a few more remarks and then we'll bring Alan back up and we both be happy to take your questions I just wanted to comment a little bit on the reaction to the fly by the press reaction the public reaction it was overwhelming after all of that a toiling for so many years that Alan and I have been talking about a lot of it in obscurity a lot of the public didn't know that New Horizons was happening the launch was in the news a little bit and then over all those years I think a lot of people forgot that we had a spacecraft on the way to Pluto and then of course at the time of the flyby it burst back into the public view in a big way and this this encounter was like no other planetary encounter in history Alan mentioned a little bit about what it was like to be there the crowds of people the excitement the the team itself the the the emotion after all that effort and then you know the flyby is very concentrated in the short period of time all the really intense activity and the you know everybody's sort of sleepless and breathless and it's very surreal the sense of I talked to a lot of the team members about what the experience was like to be there and a lot of them had this feeling of you know time sort of time dilation time stretching out and this feeling that this is one of the peak moments of my life and I always want to remember every detail because I'm gonna be playing back this tape in my mind for the rest of my life and yet I'm so busy I've been up all night and I've got to analyze this image and go do this interview and you know is this crazy time and then for the the people gathered there the excitement was just so intense that there were there was real drama because Alan showed you that picture of the hug with it with Alice Bowman at the the time when we got the the phone home message but there were many hours where we knew that New Horizons had passed by Pluto but we didn't know if it had worked because it takes so long for the signal to come back we knew it had passed through the system it was already on its way out from Pluto but then everyone was there gathered waiting for the the phone home moment and and that was real drama it wasn't staged in that it was an auditorium of people like like this watching on the screen what was happening just across campus where Allen and the team were gathered and you saw Alice Bowman with her screens watching for these green beacons and having her different leads of our engineering teams reporting in that that the navigation had worked and that the memory was full and that no no of what were they no no no no emergency procedures had been triggered and and that basically everything had worked and that the spacecraft was outbound from Pluto with memories full of all the information and when that was reported and we saw Alan and Alice hugging and everybody yeah me just everybody was just like ecstatic in the auditorium this size but the really incredible thing was that it wasn't limited to that location because unlike the Voyager Encounters which in a way were the last time something like this had happened in 1989 something had happened since 1989 the internet had been invented and so this encounter was immediately a global phenomenon and you had this sense of participation instantaneously around the world the images were going out and people were tweeting and it was on Instagram and messages were coming in and there was this global feeling of participation that was so cool and Alan and I while we've been doing this this tour the last couple weeks talking about this new book we've been meeting people with stories of where they were during this it's reinforced this sense that it really was a global event the other night we met this guy who was the head of the Astronomical Society of Guiana and he was telling us how he and his friends out and out in there village there with their internet connection were at the time of the ska by were watching the images coming in and they were hugging and cheering and then we we have met this other guy who during the flyby was in a bunker in Kabul serving in the Marines and and he and his colleagues there in their little he said the computer system wasn't that good because it's all hardened and whatever but that they were hitting refresh and hitting refresh and every time a new Pluto image came in they were you know they were like whoo so you know this was really something that because now we're globally connected that people were able to experience simultaneously as this sort of global human celebration of this uniquely human achievement so it was tremendous and and the press result of the press response was so cool this is a the New York Times the very next morning on July 15th 2015 and and the team had talked for a long time about we're gonna when are we going to transmit the New York Times picture it was this sort of idea they had that if everything worked that they would on the on the 15th get a picture that would be on the cover of the New York Times and it was here it is above the fold but what's so cool on this slide this is the New York Times issue from exactly fifty years earlier to the day July 15th 1965 and remember I told you about the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars and remember that date well here this is 50 years to the date though that first flyby of Mars we're returning the first pictures from the surface of another planet by spacecraft 50 years later here we are at Pluto with New Horizons and these two New York Times covers these two images cap an era where our species was first sending spacecraft to the other world of the solar system and it's really a wonderful thing about our time that we're alive that we've been able to do this and it's just the beginning of our exploration of the universe but it represents what Carl Sagan used to call the preliminary reconnaissance of the solar system and it began here and it ended here it's not over but as far as the classical plants that we knew about when we started exploring now we've been to all of them with new horizons and the global creativity that poured out of people's response to this as Alan mentioned NASA had two billion web hits the largest web response ever to an event with NASA and people started just taking those images and sending them back to us with all kinds of incredible creativity and humor and fun and insight and this is just one sample of some of what appeared on the web all these memes you know the little prince and the Death Star but also some really cool scientific this is showing the transition from the hub best Hubble Space Telescope wheel Pluto before New Horizons to what Pluto actually looked like when New Horizons revealed it and the way the moon's spin around and you know people were just doing all kinds of beautiful crazy creative stuff and so it was really gratifying after all of that to see that the world responded in such a sort of joyous and insightful way collectively to exploring Pluto the last thing I want to mention is that New Horizons is not done it's still going it's out exploring the Kuiper belt and it's going to intercept one more target there's gonna be another flyby this New Year's Eve 2018 2019 New Year's Eve near horizon is on track to intercept an object that's now been nicknamed Ultima Thule which means beyond the farthest frontier it's a Norse expression and we don't know very much about it we know that it's small maybe about 30 mile 20 30 miles across and it's sort of got a strange shape a double lobe we don't know if it's actually two objects orbiting each other or two pieces squished together beyond that we know nothing and it's we do know that it's a billion miles farther out than Pluto by far the farthest thing that we will have ever explored and that is another encounter coming up this New Year's Eve so pay attention and watch for those pictures and after that who knows New Horizons may be able to encounter more objects the team is going to look very hard and try to find something else that New Horizons can intercept but either way it's going to keep going and when I say keep going I mean it's really going to keep going New Horizons will be the fifth human built spacecraft that is going fast enough so that it will completely escape our solar system the other two were pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 what New Horizons is now following in their footsteps it's going fast enough so that the Sun's gravity will never stop it it will keep going it will escape our solar system and it will literally wander forever through the galaxy it will outlive I would guess human civilization it will certainly outlive the earth and the Sun and it it's really eternal so there's one little part of the story of New Horizons that that truly is eternal a little memento of our civilization of our time our curious and inventive species sent this object past Pluto that will keep going and if anybody ever finds it they'll they'll know something interesting about our civilization and with that thought the Eternity of New Horizons wandering through the galaxy carrying some ashes of Clyde Tombaugh along with it I want to stop there and bring Alan back up and we'll entertain your questions thank you more than just nitrogen or like is there other stuff underneath that yes that's a really good question down below the methane and the nitrogen the more exotic stuff is Pluto's crust which is made of water ice and it's actually several hundred miles thick and at the bottom of it where the temperatures are warm enough the water ice actually melts and we believe there's a liquid water ocean down there pretty amazing and below the ocean is the core of the planet which is made of rock and actually Pluto is about two-thirds rock by mass it's one of the surprising things we learned back in the 80s is kind of a hoarder at that moment when we could first know the size and the mass we could get the density and show that it's really a rocky planet with an icy exterior and that was very surprising to learn in the beginning that and the edge of the outer solar system was a rocky planet and so that's a great question Pluto's mostly rock two-thirds about one-third water ice and all the stuff that's exotic is just a veneer on the very surface we'll take a question from over here along those same lines what's the atmosphere made of I know the shot is it's you know as Horizons was pulling away shows that that beautiful blue so it's it's oxygen it's actually largely nitrogen which is cool because that's the air in this room that you're breathing is largely nitrogen and there's also methane in the atmosphere and what's interesting about that is that the substances on the surface that big glacier is nitrogen and Alan pointed out the the methane snow caps on top of the mountains so you have one of the interesting things about Pluto is that the stuff that's forming the air is also a lot of the same stuff that's on the surface in solid form and they're exchanging all the so you have weird seasonal effects and this sort of morphing between the atmosphere and the surface that's a result of the fact that the same materials are formed it's it's as if it's it's as if on earth you know the rock then the atmosphere was was gaseous rock yeah it's not but on a place like Pluto it's the same stuff in the air and and plaiting out on the surface thank you yes sir yeah so I had a question about that nitrogen glacier that has that new surface so I understand Pluto's on its way out from parolin is it possible it actually gets warm enough to resurface itself every orbit it could be we actually see patterns on the surface of the glacier which we didn't show pictures of that the geologist will call cellular pattern not meaning something's alive there but geological cells that that our best modeled by a process like convection like a roving boil on a pan that you heat it's causing a vertical overturning so no doubt well I shouldn't say no doubt but probably this feature is very old but it's constantly renewing itself and therefore erasing craters and the effective age of the surface that what we call the CRE or crater retention age is what's very young the actual material may be very old but something is causing a heat source below that nitrogen glacier on that vast scale the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined and we're not sure what that is people have scientists have ideas we're not sure which one is right or if any of them are right there's another idea we haven't found yet will will eventually learn that either through making a solid case from computer modeling or when we send the orbiter back and we get more data in the future which is what we want to do and we can really constrain what that energy source is thank you yeah over here now and it was a such nice flyby event that many movie stars and the singers and celebrities came right it would be a good opportunity to use this marketing tool marketing vehicle to collect funding for the next mission you can launch most more probes maybe larger probes and etc how do you mean like if they could have charged money then the fly by or had pay-per-view elsewhere I will imaginable technique but if there is some interest from the society even movie stars come there is an opportunity here yeah absolutely it's not it's not like you're gonna raise money through the flyby but you're absolutely right I mean everything we do missions funded by NASA it's all based on public support it depends on you know it's it's supported by the taxpayers and so public interest in what we do is crucial and that is one of the benefits of something like this flyby and the tremendous excitement generated by the imagery and the media response is that at least for you know a brief time it's incredibly visible what we're doing and that's the payoff for that investment that people make and yes the excitement that's generated you know we hope and we believe does help contribute to support in the general public to continue and doing more more exploration as well as inspiring young people to to be interested in science and exploration and and also it's inspiring people to to realize that that our country and our society can do wonderful things you know that we're still on our game in some very important ways because you know we did this so it's something to be proud of yes sir so thank you both for a compelling presentation about a compelling topic Allen as you know I'm a science educator and a lot of times were battling misconceptions and I want to also thank you for being an eloquent defender of Pluto status as a legacy planet but I kinda wanted to ask you if you'd be willing to go to the other side and change a misconception every time you say Kuiper belt quite per belt a belt is flat and this is an area that is massively large and shaped like a giant torus or a doughnut when I edit fifth-graders I call it the Kuiper doughnut so I don't know if that's a good term but do you have any ideas or would you be compelled to to help people along that in that regard I've never been asked that question I like donuts a lot so I like this idea maybe if we could take a tip from Elon Musk you'd called the BFD okay okay okay let me also say though about the the Pluto planet thing that of course the whole thing with the astronomers just a bunch of BS and we all know what that stands for bad science and we can talk about that too if somebody has a question about it but as far as the actually there was a time let's see what did we call it I don't know but that donut idea is a really good one okay thank you thanks okay so my question is is there a particular aspect to the new horizon probes design that you think makes it unlike any of other spacecraft of its type there are a number of really innovative aspects to the design and in the book we talked about how we actually managed to get it in the cost box by doing some pretty radical things taking some risks but also some we made some intelligent compromises like a much lower bit rate communication system than Voyager in a way we went backwards but it allowed us to save a lot of money not because the communication system was less expensive it was but it allowed us to only need one instead of two nuclear power generators and those babies are eighty million dollars apiece but what was really innovative was we're the first mission extensively used nation for operational purposes so that we didn't have to babysit the spacecraft and pay flight controllers to sit at control panels three shifts a day seven days a week for ten years and that actually is a huge savings when you integrate over all the salaries in ten years and letting people thought at first that if we didn't babysit the spacecraft things could go haywire and by the time we got word of it it would be too late the spacecraft would have died for some reason like a fuel leak or repeated power problems or computer resets but we put a lot of thought into the software for how it could take care of itself and now that hibernation technique is used pretty extensively for other missions and it's kind of become ho-hum but we're very proud of having really taken that out of the sci-fi future realm of what spacecraft could do and implementing it so thanks thank you for coming next thank you for the really engaging talk I remember when the flyby happened three years ago I was curious like how close you know the the spacecraft actually came by Pluto and I remember actually being surprised that it was like something like 12,000 kilometers that's right flyby when the planet was only 2,000 kilometers wide and at that distance you know Pluto is probably no bigger than like your fist held at arm's length I'm sorry sorry so in my mind I was thinking like the camera technology on the spacecraft must must have been pretty extraordinary to be able to capture all that detail given that you know if I was just using my my own cameras at home like DSLR cameras that wouldn't come out anywhere with that level of details so as somebody who takes a lot of photos and I'm also an astro photographer or you know I take photos of galaxies and nebulae I'm kind of curious if you could share a little bit about the camera technology maybe share like the sensor size the resolution you know the focal length like was it a was it like a massive telephoto lens that you used or what kind of cameras did you have well first let me say that your numbers are right that basic will be flew by something the size of the United States from the distance of Japan okay and we didn't want to come closer because that would actually compromise the science remember we're going 32,000 miles an hour and if you don't want the images to be smeared so there's a this is you don't want to get too close because then you can't compensate for the smear and also remember that the light levels of Pluto are a thousand times lower than in broad daylight so the camera has to be very sensitive in these very low light levels and all those things conspire together to make the technical challenge that you described both of our cameras the the Ralph color camera which also has a black and white component what we call panchromatic and the Laurie telephoto which is really a telescope not a lens use CCD detectors to form digital images just like your phone does but much more sophisticated CCDs than that and the spacecraft actually tracks the targets to compensate for motion as it's going by so it's it's going by the planet it's actually turning at just the right rate to freeze the motion and that allowed us to get images as good as 70 meters per pixel that wasn't achieved on Mars till the 6th mission to Mars but we had the advantage of much later 2000 Zehra technology and the mapping that we did was good enough that had to be flown over let's say San Francisco at the same altitude with New Horizons and looked down we would not only be seeing the layout of the city but we'd be seeing that individual buildings downtown at that resolution and for the larger ones we could tell their shape and that's pretty impressive that we could do that and map the planet that way on a fast flyby on the first try I think thank you three more questions okay thank you very much we'll go to this side what was both your favorite parts of the amazing journey to Pluto and why favorite parts of the amazing journey Wow well I mean you have to say ultimately the fly by itself and that moment of first seeing the detailed pictures and realizing that everything we thought we knew about small planets that far from the Sun was wrong because you see this image basically it wasn't quite that good when we first saw it but basically that geography you see that bright heart it's clear that there's something going on there an area that's fresh and new and has no craters so there's some activity it's vibrant its varied it's beautiful just the appreciation of how beautiful it was and at the same time how interesting it was and how much new understanding we were going to get from it you knew immediately when you saw those first images that this was something really really special so that moment but then I would also have to say the launch was extraordinary because it was you know very physically powerful to behold and there was a lot of anxiety leading up to it was it going to work it's a moment of real risks if something could go wrong and yet afterwards the joy and the celebration and seeing this team that had worked so hard you know partying and having a great time and just celebrating for a moment before they got busy with the hard work of flying across the solar system for me those are two very special moments that stammers gonna bring up the parties myself but actually David answered very eloquently about the science the big discoveries how complex Pluto is now active it is and how that defied our imagination the biggest surprise of the whole journey for me was something completely unexpected it and it was not just the scale of the public response but the number of people that have written in our team one way or the other about how it personally moved them affected their lives it you know it caused well we write about this at the end of the book in the coda how people just come out of the woodwork and they'll say you know my son was a failing student a slacker who watched their flyby and in nine months has become a straight-a student and I said I want to do that when I grow up and and that woman that that I'm talking about actually said it to me in tears while shaking my hand she said your project saved my son's life the that kind of response as a scientist you know to see that it really moved and changed people's lives that way it was probably the best discovery of new horizons really for me that was it so thank you for asking thank you so we we have two more questions one more question which one - okay we can take one on this side and one on that side given the bandwidth transmit power antenna game path losses things like that how much longer will you be able to maintain a two-way link and can you upload more sophisticated data compression and error correction codes that weren't available when it was launched to extend that he's violating the one-question rule they're both really good was I was a two-part it was a two-part it's one question with two parts so we actually it can calculate that with this transmitter in current day technology on the ground we can communicate with New Horizons about seven times farther from the Sun than it is now Wow set to about 200 times as far away as the earth is from the Sun however that's not going to happen because every year the radioactive decay of the plutonium produces less power and somewhere in the late 2030s we won't have enough power to run the spacecraft systems and we'll have to turn it off and we're only gonna be about 78 times as far away not 200 so we have the capability to communicate further way but we won't make it that far because the nuclear battery won't do it and therefore the second part of your question about more sophisticated encoding or a better ground system or whatever probably won't matter because we're just gonna run out of power in the battery thank you though last question when do you plan to send your next mission pass Pluto and are you gonna send astronauts in the future well what we'd like to do next is send a robot orbiter to do the next logical phase of exploration to go there to stay watch time variations bring kind of instrumentation that that we couldn't bring on new horizons like mass spectrometers to sample the atmosphere radars to probe through the ice to find out how deep it is and if there are liquids below it magnetic sensors call magnetometers to look for evidence of currents in that ocean that might be deep down under the ice and things like that astronauts will come with time I I'm sure I won't live to see it but you'll probably be the commander of that crew yeah I mean to answer your second question will we send astronauts absolutely yes not on the next mission to Pluto but but people will go there because people are going to go everywhere in the solar system eventually because that's the kind of species we are right we were we once lived only in the continent of Africa and but then we ventured farther and we human beings explore and we go to new places we we can't help it we're like cats we're really curious you know and that's just that's just our nature and so extend that far farther in the future and there's no doubt that people will eventually go to Pluto and maybe maybe you will be part of that mission [Applause]

Channel: SVAstronomyLectures

Views: 4,185

Rating: 4.710145 out of 5

Keywords: astronomy, science, astrophysics, science news, Pluto, New Horizons, Kuiper Belt, Alan Stern, David Grinspoon, solar system, planet, space exploration

Id: ovejGsYnV3Y

Length: 103min 41sec (6221 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018