I think it’s time to tell you all why I’m so excited about the New Horizons Pluto flyby. The probe just went radio silent so it can focus all its energies on capturing data during the encounter, which happens tomorrow.
Somewhere around thirty years ago I sat in my bedroom reading a book with one picture-rich chapter for each of the 9 then-planets. When I got to the last chapter, on Pluto, the only real picture was a tiny gray smudge. The book made due with “artists renditions” to fill out the remaining pages. It was such a striking contrast to the other eight planets with their bright beautiful full-page Voyager pictures. It intrigued me to realize there was this whole world on the edge of our solar system about which we knew next to nothing.
I remember very distinctly thinking, with a little pride, that someday we would fix that. Voyager 2 was fresh on my mind. It wasn’t long before that I watched the Neptune encounter on television. We were a curious and intelligent people and we would go to Pluto some day. I felt a little thrill of curiosity and exploration. Naively I never imagined it would take so long.
For years I would occasionally see what the pluto state of the art looked like. When the internet rolled around, I could google pluto pictures easily. But our view evolved very very slowly. I remember when two new moons were added. I remember when we first teased out surface features using Hubble and some serious image processing. And I especially remember my excitement when New Horizons launched almost 10 years ago. It seemed like the fulfillment of a life-long dream, and also like an impossibly long wait. Ten years!
Tomorrow New Horizons arrives at Pluto for a very brief flyby. The encounter lasts only a few hours because we’re moving so fast. But we’ll collect so much data in that time that it’ll be months before we have it all downloaded and years before we make sense of it all. That said, tomorrow when the first images arrive, we’ll get a high resolution crystal clear look at this world, which has been there for four billion years waiting patiently to be understood. It is something I have literally been looking forward to for thirty years. I can still picture that artists rendition from my book, and I’m so excited we’re about to replace it with the real deal.
Are we there yet? Yes. See you on the other side, New Horizons 2015.
