[MUSIC] Hey guys, do not adjust your screens, I know it seems a little dark, but this is what it
looks like at high noon on the dwarf planet Pluto. It takes a little more than 5 hours
for light from the Sun to reach Pluto, but it took a little spacecraft named New Horizons
almost ten years! Since its closest approach on July 14, 2015 it's been sending back incredible
images and scientific data, completely redefining what we know about Pluto, teaching us more
than we found out in the entire 85 years since its discovery. Here's what it's shown us. [MUSIC] New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006
on top of an Atlas V rocket spewing out more than 2 million pounds of thrust. It was the
first spacecraft shot directly out of orbit, escaping the pull of the Earth and Sun with
a launch velocity of over 16 kilometers per second, the fastest spacecraft launch ever.
The kind of mad science orbital trajectories that you don't see outside of Kerbal Space
Program. A year later, it flew by Jupiter and used
its gravity as a slingshot to speed toward its encounter in the Kuiper belt. Before New Horizons, our view of Pluto made
Space Invaders look high-definition. This is Pluto as we know it now, a planet
full of more questions than answers, a far-away world that’s redefining what we know about
the icy outer reaches of our solar system. The cameras and sensors on New Horizons were
pre-programmed for the flyby, so making sure they weren’t pointed at empty space meant
hitting a spot in space just 100 km wide and 150 km tall, and arriving there within 100
seconds of when they planned… after flying for nearly ten years! "That's impossible, even for a computer!" Next time you’re late for dinner, you’ve
got no excuse. So New Horizons made it to Pluto, engaged
its instruments, and scienced all over that little I dwarf planet. So what have we learned
so far? For starters, Pluto looks awesome! Before
this year, this was our best view of Pluto, and to be honest we’ve never really known
much about it. Scientists expected some surprises, and Pluto definitely hasn’t disappointed. Pluto’s heart is its most famous feature.
It’s been named Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer that discovered Pluto
in 1930. This heart is weird! Its western half, where
temperatures average just 38 Kelvin, is bordered by flowing nitrogen glaciers, and in the middle,
a frozen plain made up of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ice. Farther down we
find three and a half kilometer-high mountains made of water ice. Those sharp mountains and Tombaugh Regio’s
crater-free surface means that these features are pretty young, at least in planetary terms.
Many people expected Pluto to be a dead ball of ice, but it’s geologically active, and
scientists have no idea why. The name Pluto is popularly associated with
the Disney character, so you might expect that when it came time to name features on
this dwarf planet NASA would use warm and fuzzy names like Disney Mountain, and The
Forest of Fairy Flowers. However, Pluto's name actually originates
as another name for Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. And so instead we have names
like the Balrog Macula, Cthulhu Regio, and Mordor Macula, which is a very long way from
the Shire. When it came to naming features on the moon
Charon the researchers really let their nerd colors shine. In true-color images we see that Pluto should
join Mars our solar system’s second “red planet”. That color comes from compounds
called “tholins” formed when hydrocarbons in Pluto’s atmosphere are zapped with ultraviolet
radiation and then rain down onto the surface. New Horizons captured this great silhouette
showing Pluto’s thin atmosphere of mostly nitrogen gas.
Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, has been equally full of surprises. Charon is so big that it
almost forms a binary planet system with Pluto. The dark area near the moon's pole, called
Mordor, might be a huge crater from an impact large enough to have melted the moon. We don’t
know for sure, but that cooling off would explain why its surface is young and smooth
like Pluto. And it’s got this enormous “mountain in a moat” like someone just walked up and
stuck a rock in it. Nobody knows what’s going on! New Horizons also gave us our first close-up
views of Pluto’s tiny moons Nix and Hydra, which look like potatoes.
Thanks to New Horizons, here’s what Pluto’s family portrait looks like today New Horizons verified that Pluto can keep
its crown as “biggest dwarf planet”. It’s about 48 kilometers wider than Eris, the second-biggest
dwarf in the solar system. In a speech after the flyby, NASA chief Charles
Bolden said “we have now visited every single planet in our solar system.” Overlooking
the obvious error in that statement, Mr. Bolden you are WRONG! We are not done! Counting our missions to Ceres and Pluto,
we’ve visited 10 planet-ish objects in the solar system, and just a handful of moons.
But what about the other dwarf planets? Eris? Haumea? Makemake? Pallas? What about missions to Europa, or Titan? What
about trojans and centaurs and comets and trans-Neptunian objects? I didn’t even know
what those were until like a week ago! As of July 2015, there’s more than 600,000
known minor planet objects in our solar system, from asteroids and comets to dwarf planets
like Pluto. There’s a lot we don’t know about our neighborhood, and we’re not done
yet. New Horizons is now far past Pluto, flying
on into the Kuiper Belt, and it will continue to send back new science as long as it’s
got power and as long as we’re still listening. What I wanna know is where are we going next?
Stay curious. Hey everybody, if you want to calculate Pluto
time where YOU live, I've put a link to that tool from NASA and a bunch of other awesome
New Horizons science down in the description. Make sure to subscribe, and I'll see you soon.
I hate it when people use the word "science" as a verb.