A Window Into Pluto, and Hopes of Opening Other Doors

LAUREL, Md.:  During the early hours of July 14, Eastern time, a series of radio waves went out from giant antennas in Canberra, Australia, and Goldstone, Calif., in the direction of a collection of stars known as the “teaspoon” in the constellation Sagittarius.

In a feat of Einsteinian navigation, they caught up, four and a half hours later, with a spacecraft named New Horizons that was speeding past Pluto at 30,000 miles per hour and was ready to phone home. The craft had just slipped into the shadow of the dwarf planet and turned around to look back at the Earth through Pluto’s atmosphere.

It was an extraordinary time for a cosmic selfie, a historic day in space and here on Earth.

It will be left to historians of future decades to decide whether President Obama made the right choice in deciding to talk to his enemies rather than to bomb them.

About Pluto, history will have an easier task. Everybody alive on Earth was ready for some good news. It was easy to fall in love with Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager – a.k.a. “Mom” – for New Horizons, who spoke about the spacecraft as one would a child gone off to college as she calmly took an inventory of its systems when it finally made contact. The spacecraft had been taught well and was thriving.

And so, it was possible to say in that moment, was science. A decade of missed sleep, holidays and family time, a great adventure in persistence, ingenuity and vision had paid off in data that would keep coming down for the next year and a half. Not only will the information provide a better view of Pluto’s “heart,” but perhaps clues to the origin of the planets and solar system, frozen and stored all these eons out there in the ice cube tray of the gods.

In the audience at a news conference here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where the spacecraft was built and operated, were a handful of children, Plutokids, born on the day New Horizons was launched: Jan. 19, 2006. Invited to ask a question, one 9-year-old asked about the mission of New Horizons.

That was a good question.

If all goes well, New Horizons will continue traveling outward to encounter other denizens of the Kuiper belt, the vast zone of icy wreckage beyond the known planets. But the larger question is what this generation of Plutokids and their peers can look forward to.

With this trip to Pluto, S. Alan Stern, the leader of New Horizons mission, said, humans have now visited all the known worlds, the starry crib into which we were born.

© 2015, The New York Times News Service