So much has been written in the last week about the amazing images - and many more to come - sent back from the New Horizons spacecraft after its flyby of Pluto.
Those incredible pictures and the deeper understanding of the origins of the solar system that will come from the analysis of those pictures and other scans taken of the planet more than 3.5 billion miles away are the product of a group of passionate individuals who spent much of their adult life working towards this summer.
Last week, PBS aired Chasing Pluto, a one-hour documentary about the legendary planet, on its long-running science show Nova. While the program did pay attention to the solar system's far-flung oddball, it rightfully paid more attention to the people who did the chasing.
New Horizons is an engineering marvel, constructed by some ridiculously clever engineers and scientists. For starters, it communicates with its masters on Earth with just a 10-watt signal. To put that in perspective, CFIS-FM, Prince George's community radio station, upgraded earlier this year from five watts, which couldn't be heard on a radio outside of the Bowl, to 500 watts, which lets it at least be heard to city limits. Commercial radio stations measure their broadcast power in kilowatts or thousands of watts. As Chasing Pluto showed, massive satellite dishes at three different places on Earth are able to remain in constant contact with New Horizons, focusing in on that faint signal that takes four-and-a-half hours at the speed of light to reach Earth.
The distance and that faint signal means it will take about 16 months to send back all of the information gathered from the Pluto flyby by the various sensors aboard New Horizons, even as it continuous to speed further and further away from Pluto and into the Kuiper Belt, a mysterious ring of small stellar bodies that circle the solar system. By the time all of that data arrives next November, New Horizons will have already travelled another 400 million miles or more than four times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
The precision of New Horizons is perhaps its most amazing feature. It took some incredible work by astrophysicists to put together a flight path covering more than nine-and-a-half years, from its launch in early 2006, to its close encounter with Jupiter a year later. Besides giving scientists a chance to test some of the scanning instruments on New Horizons, the solar system's biggest planet also provided the spacecraft with what NASA called a "gravity boost" to greatly increase its speed. The NOVA documentary on PBS explained it as a slingshot effect, similar to the technique roller derby players use to help their teammates go faster.
From there, New Horizons took a seven-year nap. Except for brief, daily check-ins with Earth, the spacecraft all but shut down as it rocketed towards the distant borders of the solar system.
Last week, New Horizons passed within 7,700 miles of Pluto's surface, a miracle of precision flying to launch a flying machine from one moving object (Earth) to travel nearly a decade and billions of miles to reach another moving object.
Pluto has been nothing but full of surprises since it was discovered in 1930, from its four moons to its surprisingly varied geography and atmospheric conditions. Although it lost its status as a "real" planet years ago, it is still an object of fascination for astronomers and stargazers. As Chasing Pluto explains, Pluto's orbit isn't on the same plane as the other planets, it has an elliptical orbit around the sun, not a round one like Earth and the other planets. It isn't even the largest body in the Kuiper Belt. Still, a "dwarf planet" is still a planet and Pluto is still special.
One of the astrophysicists following the New Horizons project is literally a rock star in the scientific world. Dr. Brian May was at NASA headquarters last Friday to take in the celebrations and to study the first data transmissions from Pluto. Radio listeners on Earth and in Prince George may be unfamiliar with May's academic work but most are knowledgeable about his output as the guitarist for Queen. He put aside his doctoral studies 40 years ago as his musical hobby took off, but he finally finished his PhD a few years ago.
May and his fellow scientists are now gaga over the incredible information coming back to Earth over a thin radio transmission from billions of miles away. It will apparently take years for them to fully study and comprehend the rich data.
Now that's a crazy little thing called love.
