This feels like something of a new golden age for NASA, and for space enthusiasm in general. In two months and one day exactly, the New Horizons spacecraft at 32,600 mph the fastest ever built, will reach Pluto. Even at that incredible speed, it will end up taking a full nine years to reach Pluto. Right now it's about 50 million miles away, roughly half the distance between Earth and the Sun. But perhaps even more intriguingly, in three years, the James Webb Space Telescope, many times more powerful than Hubble, will go into orbit, offering up images of what light looked like only 300,000 years after the Big Bang. To tide us over, we'll have to make due with knowing more about Pluto than ever before.
Since its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, Pluto has been an object of keen interest, as it was the only planet added to the previous eight discovered in the twentieth century. Pluto represented the limitless horizons of discovery in our own time, the grand possibility of major new findings in our own celestial backyard. But we've made precious little progress in learning about it since it first appeared to human eyes.
The conditions of its discovery, and its tiny size and extreme distance from the Sun, also make it one of the quirkiest planets. Its tragic demotion at the callous hands of Mike Brown, self-proclaimed Pluto killer, only made it more endearing.
Tombaugh was an unlikely planetary discoverer--he didn't attend college, and lived on his family's farm in Kansas. Working almost entirely by his own will and ingenuity, he built an extremely powerful telescope, and discovered Pluto. Pluto got its name from an unusually bright eleven year old schoolgirl named Venetia Burney.
But Tombaugh didn't just discover Pluto--he discovered the first Kuiper Belt Object, a chaotic region at the outermost limits of our solar system which we now know is home to hundreds of dwarf planets and moons. Pluto is actually the second largest object in the region, next to the dwarf planet Eris, but it is number one in fascination and folkloric value.
Since its discovery 85 years ago, humanity has only seen the blurriest images of Pluto--this image, hard-won though it was, is the best we've gotten, and it isn't great. With the cameras on the New Horizons, scientists will be able to see structures about the size of a small city block.
The New Horizons mission, launched in 2006, traveling 36,000 miles per hour, has traveled 2, 550,000,000 miles, and is currently only 50 million miles away from Pluto. And since this is beloved Pluto we're talking about, the spacecraft carries more homages to Pluto's discovery than any other spacecraft. NASA engineers actually figured out a way to install a portion of Tombaugh's cremated remains onboard. Tombaugh saw further than anyone in life, and now has actually, albeit in substantially altered form, traveled further than anyone.
Perhaps the best example of New Horizons embodying the spirit of Pluto's origins is in its homage to Venetia Burney. The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VBSDC) is the first ever student-designed scientific instrument to be sent into deep space. Its main aim is to analyze the immense dust streaming off of the Kuiper Belt--more than six tons every second! The Voyager spacecraft passed through the Kuiper Belt decades ago, but it had 1970s technology, and could not analyze its properties properly.
The VBSDC will provide pioneering data about the chemical composition of Kuiper Belt dust, giving us insight into how the Solar System formed, and why it looks the way it does. Though the student designers of the VBSDC were highly skilled and trained, they were to some extent amateurs--just like Tombaugh.
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