The Year of Pluto - New Horizons Documentary Brings Humanity Closer to the Edge of the Solar System

there's a mysterious Zone far out in our solar system it's a region of ice worlds some solitary some with moons their names may be unfamiliar AIS maake haa but they hold Clues to all our Origins and the first of these worlds and the one will reach in 2015 is the king of the Kyper belt Pluto the long journey of NASA's New Horizons Mission began in 2006 aboard America's biggest baddest rocket tricked out with every conceivable booster we built a very light spacecraft and bought a very large launch vehicle and the combination is ferocious but in

some sense it All Began in 1930 with Clyde tomall 24 years old and fresh off a farm in Kansas but willing to spend long hours scanning starfields to find a moving point of light he Humanity's first glimpse of Pluto the dream of actually getting to Pluto began with a 6-year-old boy in love with science who grew up to lead a team of brilliant researchers and Engineers with dogged persistence through Decades of Planning and Building and testing a Race Against Time just to get to the Launchpad exploring the outer solar system because it so far takes

a lot of time it requires a lot of patience a lot of dedication a lot of perseverance but it's a frontier assuming all goes well at Pluto NASA may choose to extend the adventure further out into the Kyper belt the Solar System's mysterious third Zone this is maybe the one chance in my lifetime that we're going to get a spacecraft out there and look up close at one of these kelt objects December 6th 2014 we have New Horizons wakes up for the last time from hibernation New Horizons is speeding towards Pluto at a phenomenal rate

and we can't wait for it to get there January 27th 2015 6 months of approach science begins July 14th 2015 New Horizon's Long Journey 3 billion miles 9 years in flight and 85 years of speculation about Pluto climaxes in one day of close approach and flyby you know we're rounding third base and we're headed home the dream the adventure the promise of Discovery that's what makes 2015 the year of [Music] Pluto studying Pluto and its neighbors from Earth is one of the toughest challenges in astronomy it takes the largest telescopes and most advanced instrumentation on

the planet and and it's tough even for the Hubble Space Telescope and it takes time from the discovery of Pluto in 1930 to NASA approving the New Horizons mission in 2001 to arriving at the planet in 2015 it's been 85 years and time passing is definitely an actor in our story but it's the combination of human skill Cutting Edge image processing and sheer bloody-minded persistence that has resulted in the most important discoveries and that's a tale as true today as back in 1930 when Pluto was first found by Clyde Tomba in 2011 at The seti

Institute near San Francisco Mark shalter used Hubble data to discover two new moons around Pluto although he was actually looking for possible Rings Showalter has found Rings associated with small moons around other planets and that was kind of the motivation for uh checking out Pluto it's got two little satellites satellites raise clouds of dust let's see what might be there it's easy to take artistic license to show what Pluto's Rings might look like in reality it's incredibly hard to see faint objects against the dense background Starfield and the glare from Pluto and its large Moon

Kon we came up with this trick where you take the images and then you rotate the camera 90° you take more images and if you do that all just right you can do this thing where all that glare cancels out and what we're left with is just the Rings we can think of it as a stack of images think of it as like a cube looking down so let's uh let's turn it on its side so now if we start peeling off the layers and looking downward through the stack things suddenly become much much cleaner

for example Hydra and Nyx show up very very cleanly but the thing that immediately caught my eye was this little dot right there it's not a perfectly Sharp hot pixel like over here and that's what made it pretty convincing to me that we had seen a very small moon of Pluto that nobody had seen before to be sure you've detected a real moon or Planet you have to show it's moving unlike the background Stars the thing that makes moons distinctive is if we come back later they'd all have shifted because they all orbit the central

Planet this required a great deal of patience to then wait about 6 days until we got our next set of observations of the Pluto system sure enough the object was still there it had moved by just about the right amount to be something orbiting Pluto and we knew we had a moon next year sh Walter and colleagues went back and built on Lessons Learned to see what else might be there summer 2012 now Mark had 15 more days of Hubble observations now what you can see here are three time steps each of those time steps

is actually about 45 minutes of data does that means it's long enough that the Little Moons move it's moving back and forth in the three frame sequence Hydra is moving NYX is moving I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist to say that that looks like a little moon of Pluto it's moving just the way the other s are they're all going around the planet in the same direction and so was just a couple of weeks later that we made the announcement that the fifth Moon had been discovered patience persistence Ingenuity that was exactly what

led to the discovery of Pluto back in 1930 in Kansas in the 1920s Clyde Tomba grew up in hard times and built telescopes using leftover farm implements to check the accuracy of his best telescope he sent drawing of Mars and Jupiter to the L observatory in Flagstaff Arizona they were looking for staff and he was hired along with observing the Stars he stoked the furnace and shoveled snow but one assignment made history day after day he'd use this machine known as a blink comparator to look for anything in his images that moved it was tedious

painstaking work but on plates taken on January 23rd and 29th and analyzed in February he saw a small dot that did move against the fixed Stars announcing the results after careful confirmation The Observatory made it easy to find the new planet by adding arrows this is an incredible work of observational astronomy and having done something similar but with much more powerful tools I can really appreciate his achievement for decades Pluto remained more or less a point of life light but in the mid '70s Dale crook shank and colleagues attached cameras with infrared filters to a

telescope at kit Peak detectors or sensors had been improved and larger telescopes had become available well we did that work in 1976 and found evidence for Frozen methane on pluto surface it was several years later that we found the evidence for the other ises in 1978 astronomers Jim Christie and Bob Harrington analyzed new plates taken at the US Naval Observatory and Flagstaff christe noted an elongation to the north of Pluto 1 month later the bump had disappeared from this and other evidence they concluded that Pluto like Earth had a moon Kon from eclipses between Pluto

and Kon occurring in the 1980s astronomers calculated that the moon was almost half the size of its parent body so large that both objects spin around their Mutual Center of gravity outside Pluto Pluto and Kon were the first double dwarf planet combo discovered in our solar system using the basic physics of their orbits and the distance between them astronomers could calculate their mass and size Pluto was a little smaller than Earth's Moon about 1500 m in diameter and had only one tenth its mass between 1985 and 1990 astronomers were in luck as Pluto and Karen

orbited their Mutual ual center of gravity each passed in turn in front of the other the so-called Mutual events allowed astronomers like Mark buoy to capture the changing patterns of light patiently buoy created a map of Pluto Pluto turned out to have one of the two most contrasty surfaces in the entire solar system in the mid90s buoy and Allan Stern used the Hubble Space Telescope to make the first direct images of Pluto's surface and it's exciting to mark and I and to our whole scientific team uh to be able to see this object that no

humans really could Glimpse as a real planet as a real object in the solar system previously in 2005 Hal Weaver and Allen Stern used the Hubble for another close-up look at Pluto and Kon they discovered two small dim moons where only Kon had been seen before now we know from Mark showalter's work that there are two more moons making the current total of five and that Pluto is a genuine many planetary system from its size and orbit astronomers estimated that Pluto is perhaps 70% Rock and 30% ice that makes it one of the largest of

a whole new class of objects the ice dwarf planets making up what's known as the Kyper belt this region is named for Gerard Kyper a leading mid 20th century planetary astronomer Kyper suggested that the solar system didn't end with Neptune and Pluto but that there should be a dis of other other worlds Beyond them in 1992 from a Mountaintop in Hawaii David jitt and Jane Lou found the first Kyer belt object they were using new and highly sensitive ccds like the sensors in a modern digital camera but their technique was essentially an updated version of

tomba's work take carefully registered images of a patch of sky and see if anything moves against the distant Stars this one qb1 did just that it was only a few hundred km across 10 times smaller than Pluto but still huge compared to a comet since then teams of astronomers have found around 2,000 kbos informed by Cutting Edge astronomy but with a fair dose of artistic license let's take a trip through this third zone of our solar system we used to think of the solar system of consisting of two different types of planets the planets we

call the terrestrial planets which are earthlike planets that would be Mercury Venus Earth and Mars next out the asteroid belt fragments of Worlds smashed to Pieces by gravitation and collisions then come the four gas giants Jupiter and its moons Saturn with its magnificent Rings Uranus also ringed and Neptune and then Pluto was this kind of you know odd guy out it was this little object at the edge of the solar system and then when we found all these other Qui rebelled objects this is kind of almost a third type of object so for the first

time ever we'll be able to fly by a brand new object an object that's been forming for billions of years and understand what outer parts of the solar system are all about by July 2015 we'll know for sure what Pluto and its moons look like and that will provide breakthrough information on all those other ice dwarf planets the most numerous planetary objects in the entire solar system that make up the Kyper belt actually the Kyper belt is more like a dut bulging up above and down below the ecliptic where most of the planets move it's

kind of like the asteroid belt but much bigger it has hundreds of times more objects in it than the asteroid belt let's now visit five named kbos in the exact positions they'll be in on July 14th 20 5 the day when New Horizons flies by Pluto quaa was one of the first Kyper Bel objects to discovered it's about 1,000 km in diameter a reddish World covered in water ice methane and ethane and like many kbos it has a tiny Moon of its own way what up above and down below the plane of the solar system

numerous kbos have been flung about by Neptune's gravity this region is known as the scattered disc one of the largest of these kbos aerys is close in size to Pluto and is made of rock and methane ice astronomers categorize kbos by the tilt of their orbits relative to the plane of the solar system and one of the more highly inclined orbits belongs to Mak Mak named for a Hawaiian creation deity some of these have methane or water ice on their surfaces some of them just seem to be covered in some brownish Gunk there are gray

objects out there there are brown objects out there they seem to be distinct populations some of them seem to be very spherical and so they probably have warm interiors and then others are peculiar shapes which suggest they're very cold and strong perhaps the most bizarre and unexpected kbo is how AA a kbo shaped like an American football made of rock and Ice it's white with red splotches and orbited by at least two moons one of the strangest orbits of any kbo belongs to sedna discovered in 2003 its orbit is the most eccentric of any kbo

now known bringing it as close as 76 Au to the Sun but then carrying it outward to 936 times the the Earth Sun distance sedna's strange 11,000 year orbit seems to link it to an even vaster cloud of objects ready for exploration by Future Generations the ort cloud is an immense ice box of long period comets from 10 to 100 times more distant than the Kyper belt surrounding All the known worlds of our solar system there's a real record of the early history of the solar system out there in Cold Storage at the edge of

the solar system this is what was left over Pluto is the first member of that group but to begin Humanity's exploration of the Kyper belt you first have to get to Pluto and that means getting a mission approved a spacecraft designed and built and delivered to the Launchpad on time and none of that was [Music] easy 2015 may be the year of Pluto but getting there has taken many long years of effort and for New Horizons there's a date when things got started 1989 it was the year when George Herbert Walker Bush became president and

the Berlin Wall fell far from Earth it was also the year when NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by Neptune and returned the first images of its Moon Triton hairstyles of some New Horizon scientists were very different but for them May 5th 1989 was a most important date that's the day that I marched into the then division director for planetary science at NASA headquarters Jeff Briggs as a graduate student and asked him why we aren't studying a mission to Pluto and he responded because no one's ever asked me before that seems like a brilliant idea why don't

we do that space missions rely on hundreds if not thousands of people but sometimes it takes someone with passion and persistence to make things happen and for New Horizons that's Alan Stern I was interested in this when I was a boy so I've been somewhere between in the groove and stuck in a rut for 40 years there had been some thought about sending one of the twin Voyager spacecraft past Pluto to complete the exploration of the known solar system but in the '70s the scientific establishment wasn't convinced Pluto was all that interesting young grad students

mik Allen markk buoy and Fran bagenal thought differently back in oh about late 1989 or so there was a bunch of us who were really Keen to go to Pluto and the thing that Drew me to it the most was the fact that we knew so little here's the frontier so it was a bit of an opportunity for young people to come in and say hey where are we going to go next what's the next great Frontier that we should go explore and it was clear out to the K Bel Allan Fram Mark and a

small band of enthusiasts became known as the Pluto underground so we realized to make this happen we had to get together and Campaign hard to make the case to go there and explore this little planet with all its moons all through the '90s there were many competing plans for a Pluto mission like the Pluto fast flyby the Pluto Kyper Express a Pluto mission was on then off then on then off the PLO Mission had been a cat it would have been dead long ago because they only get nine lives and we've had significantly more than

nine stoppages and odd twists and turns what finally turned the tide was the national Academy's decadal survey a consensus document from leading planetary scientists that ranked a Kyper belt Pluto mission highest in priority for medium class budgets finally after competitive proposals were evaluated New Horizons which teamed alen Stern with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory APL and several other in institutions across the country was selected by NASA on November 29th 2001 now plans on paper became metal in clean rooms in 2004 lead scientist Alan Stern described the mission's key science objective well you know the

key to planetary science is um that you really have to go places to get the resolution to get up close enough to really see what's going on we want to get up close and personal the very best resolution of current telescopes looking at Pluto would give this kind of fuzzy image of a much more familiar world but here's what New Horizons would see if flying over New York City lakes in Central Park Wares on the Hudson River your horizons is the first really of a whole new breed of spacecraft that is focusing on a very

specific task for this first mission to Pluto the questions are basic what do Pluto and Karen look like what are they made of how do their atmospheres behave we have to really be disciplined and say we can't do everything let's focus on the primary questions and design the instruments to answer those primary questions the long range imager lorri will be used for navigation approaching Pluto and close-up views during the flyby the wide-angle camera Ralph has both visible light and infrared sensors to map Pluto and Caren and characterize their icy surfaces there are two fields and

particles to detectors to probe the solar wind at Pluto the large radio antenna is an essential Communications device but both Rex and Alice an UltraViolet Imaging spectrometer are part of experiments to analyze Pluto's atmosphere and there's the Venicia Bernie student dust counter built by undergrads at UC Boulder and honoring the school girl who named Pluto back in 1930 together the seven science instruments comprise the most power powerful set of detectors ever sent on a first flyby of any world in our solar system but their Innovative and highly miniaturized design means that even when all are

operating they draw less power than half a 60 W bulb and they're intended to work together seamlessly after building comes testing but always with an eye on the clock and the calendar it's very very important that we launch in either 2006 or 2007 we have to make that deadline if you want to fly to Pluto on the quickest route you need Jupiter in position and that means we have to launch in January of 2006 it feels a little bit like being strapped to a train going 500 mph the test program involves teams of Engineers at

John's Hopkins APL and then at NASA's GD space flight center once we launched this we can't go after with a screwdriver we can't go fix anything that isn't working we make sure that we carry plenty of spare equipment on board the spacecraft if our main computer breaks we have a backup if our main transmitter breaks we have a backup one of the things we do is we put the whole spacecraft on a gigantic vibration table a paint Shaker and shake it and and then test it after that and shake it again and test it again

so that's what we're doing from now until launch along with testing the spacecraft New Horizons needs to train and test its human operators and for a mission planned to reach Pluto in 2015 15 it's important to have young people on board early so they'll be around a close approach it's good that we can do that so they will have both the time the focus to stay with the mission over this long period of time many of the faces you see around mission control in 2004 and 2005 are young and enthusiastic spacecraft Engineers normally we're focused

on subsystems and instruments in the spacecraft surviving that duration but you know for people we have to have a longevity plan they'd be committing the prime of their careers to this mission to Pluto knowing they'd be a decade older when New Horizons reaches its primary target the ability to practice things in those years far out there are all part of the planning now to assure Mission success then how old are you going to be in 2015 I don't know something somewhere in my 40s oh you're a youngster yes in late 2005 the action shifts to

Cape Canaveral New Horizons may be light and relatively small but launching it to Pluto requires America's most powerful rocket the atlas 5 New Horizons will be traveling so far from the Sun that solar panels wouldn't be sufficient so the department of energy delivered an RTG that would power the Pluto mission by turning heat from the radioactive decay of pluton I onium into electricity working Round the Clock they arrive at pad 41 Before Dawn on behalf of NASA and the entire New Horizon's team Stern wanted to be the last to bid the spacecraft bonvoyage before closing

up the hatch on January 19th 2006 after 17 years of planning building and testing a picture perfect launch that thrilled onlookers in Florida and the mission operations team back at John's Hopkins in Maryland we have Horizon vo visit Pluto and then beyond despite immense Technical and timetable challenges the mission had made its window and was on its way New Horizon's velocity at launch was the fastest ever traveling almost 60 times faster than a jetliner in just 9 hours it passed the orbit of of the Moon Apollo had taken almost 10 times that long one year

later a slingshot gravity assist from the giant planet Jupiter provided another 2 km/ second boost cutting travel time to Pluto by three full years but this was more than just a jump in speed the Jupiter flyby was a scientific dress rehearsal for Pluto New Horizon's instruments returned detailed images of Jupiter's clouds moons and we got the night wow look at that then it was off across the empty ocean of space with no new land in sight till Pluto in 2015 the spacecraft had been tested and passed with flying colors now it was time to test

the humans and the ground systems July 5th 2013 it's day one of a 9-day encounter rehearsal the main success criteria for this rehearsal is for the spacecraft to flawlessly perform its activities as if it were a pluta with everything the same except the Pluto is not there the dates in 2013 were carefully chosen so that Earth received times would be identical to those for the real encounter in 2015 Mission managers wanted scientists and Engineers to experience the stress of time critical 247 operations EXP Ed for July 2015 we're flying by an object that is a

huge distance from Earth and we're trying to hit a box that's 100 by 150 km wide and that then leads into maneuver planning and and trajectory control needed to thread that that needle and hit that small box it's way the heck out there this rehearsal would actually be uploading commands to New Horizons to instruct the spacecraft to run through the exact same set of observations as in 2015 there definitely is an element of risk involved but from one standpoint if you didn't do any simulation with the real spacecraft at all you could argue that could

POS more risk because you don't want such a critical activity only being done once on flight those are all invaluable to get us ready and and practiced for the one and only shot we'll have to explore the Pluto system we've been waiting uh 12 years since we wrote the proposals to do this rehearsal it's the last big step before we can do the encounter we think that we are about 10 million miles out from Pluto en closing but so far so good we're off to the [Music] races today is our 2724 day in flight this

has been a long time coming literally I only want to say thanks for all the work let them eat [Music] cake July 12th 2013 standing in for July 14th 2015 this is it a minute by minute simulation of encounter day it's maker break well it's it's the most important because we've best been spending the 24 hours of the most intense activities that we've been running on the spacecraft and this is the longest that we've been out of contact since we've entered encounter rehearsal this may be a rehearsal but New Horizons has been firing its thrusters

and spinning in space identical Maneuvers to those planned for 2015 on encounter day the spacecraft will be too busy taking data to send back images that's why its first simple I'm alive message will be so important sometime within the next minute DSS 43 should lock up on the signal we're we're good we're nominal spacecraft's nominal and it looks like um all the observations that plan between last track and this track happened this gives us good confidence that at least the spacecraft has been performing all of those twists and turns that we've been anticipating it to

over the last uh 7 days I like to say that at the flyby I don't want to be learning anything about the ground system or the spacecraft of the team I want to be learning only about the Pluto system no spacecraft has ever been to Pluto or nor will ever go back in our lifetime Pluto is every child's favorite planet you know you ask anyone under the age of six they're going to say Pluto we don't exactly know what Pluto looks like but it looks very exciting from the images we have from the Hubble Space

Telescope so far we really can't wait to get there and see what it actually looks like so if anybody says that Pluto is boring or not important no way before New Horizons arrives at Pluto most everything we think we know about the planet and its moons is up for grabs virtually every place we've set a spacecraft on a first reconnaissance mission like this that we find out that our earth-based Notions were flat wrong so I'll tell you what we expect but I before anything what we expect is to be surprised from the 1990s through today

Stern has been consistent in avoiding speculation you get the same answer everybody's gotten from me for almost 20 years I don't make predictions except for one my best guess is we're going to find something wonderful but in the final months leading up to the July 2015 encounter it's hard for most humans not to imagine what we'll see many planetary scientists like Paul shank base their expectations and what we saw when Voyager 2 reached Neptune and specifically as it flew by its Moon Triton Voyager was a 10e long exploration of the outer solar system and every

time they got to a planet it was basically the first time anybody had really seen those bodies so when they got to Jupiter they were greeted with enormous surprises the erupting volcanoes on on I were just completely unexpected and so when they got to Uranus there were more surprises the Exotic trains of of Miranda and Ariel for example were not expected so by the time they got to Neptune they were kind of accustomed to the idea that they were going to be surprised and sure enough uh Triton uh completely blew them away Bonnie barate was

at NASA's jet propulsion lab as the first images of Triton a moon of nearly 1,700 M diameter came down Triton was almost a twin of Pluto it's about the same size about the same brightness originally Triton was probably a Kyer belt object just like Pluto floating around in space but then it got too close to Neptune and it got captured by Neptune's gravitational field recently Paul shank enhanced the original Voyager data to create this detailed flyover of Triton it has odd patches and odd blob like features kind of like amibas crawling around on the surface

Triton has very few impact crators it's surface is extremely young geologically and it actually has ge's spting Material off into space here is a body that is hundreds of degrees below zero so cold it's forlorn it's Barren we just didn't expect to see this activity on Triton it was quite a surprise if you just assume that Pluto was going to look exactly like Triton which is the most similar object we know about then you might expect to find a very interesting body but Triton is not not the only Dynamic ice world in the outer solar

system 16 years later the Cassini spacecraft sent back images of Saturn's moon Enceladus about 300 mes across this is a tiny little Moon and Enceladus is actually a winter wonderland it's very bright it reflects almost all the radiation that falls on it and it has these huge ice volcanoes spewing out from its s South Pole and Enceladus is continuously giving off per of water vapor and so if you start to see puffs of water vapor coming off Pluto as newc Horizons gets closer that would be exceedingly interesting but what forces can power volcanoes in the

Deep Freeze of the outer solar system Triton and Pluto are both balls of ice with presumably Rock in the center and so one of the sources of energy is radioactive decay inside the rock which gives off heat just like the Earth is heated if you just let Pluto sit there and pump the heat out of the Rocks you you generate enough energy to melt a couple of hundred kmers worth of ice it's still possible to have an ocean beneath a relatively thick ice shell the ice shell might be 100 miles thick or so over billions

of years the ice shell gets thicker and thicker and thicker as Pluto cools and as it does so it squeezes the water underneath and if you squeeze the water too much then it may well actually create fractures and the water could jet out to the surface when you're going out to the edge of the solar system you kind of have to expect some surprises and we're going to see them at Pluto as well just as tridon and Enceladus were mere dots before spacecraft reached them until now Pluto has been an astronomer's Planet that's about the

change we are going to start off as astronomers and we'll be using astronomical tools to um try and sharpen up our images and pull every last little bit of detail out of these fuzzy blobs we gradually turn from astronomers into GE ologists as we get closer and it becomes a real world Jeff Moore was in the room at JPL as those Triton images came down but he also enjoys field work and thinks we'll recognize some similar planetary processes at work on Pluto as back on Earth so I'm a geologist and although we don't expect to

see oceans on Pluto there are common processes which operate on this planet which are likely to operate also on Pluto and its moons while the scales are very different erosion shapes landforms here on Earth and all across the solar system there are these little finger-like projections that are formed by the process of erosion where wind and water have sculpted this landscape by taking advantage of small differences in the strength of the original Rock creating large huge fantastic Landscapes such as on Jupiter's moon Kalisto and we can anticipate that we may perhaps also see Landscapes like

this on Pluto and its moons Pluto's 48-year orbit is more eccentric than our Solar System's terrestrial and gas giant planets greatly varying its distance to the Sun but it's typical of many other objects in the Kyper belt and newly discovered planets around other stars that plus its highly angled polar tilt combined to produce strong seasonal effects in fact the seasons of Pluto are amongst the most extreme of any seasons on any world that we know of orbiting the Sun and those extremes may be one reason why its surface is also extremely contrasty Pluto is props

the most intensely bright and dark place that we've seen in the solar system this dark surface collects more heat it warms up like asphalt does on a sunny day here on the earth and if there were Frost had settled on this dark surface they're being heated up and driven off and the transportation of this material could also be creating wind so you might see small Dunes oriented along the periphery of the dark surface showing this process in action for planetary scientists color can be a clue to the composition of surfaces that can't be sampled directly

on the earth these kinds of colors from red to uh dark gray are generated entirely by the presence or absence of rust on Pluto we see also these same ranges of colors from Gray to bright white to Yellow to Red to black but there it must be due to a completely different process at NASA's as research center near San FRC Frisco longtime Pluto researcher Dale Kook shank and postto Chris mes conduct experiments to see what processes might create the colors we see on Pluto starting with gases like methane and nitrogen and the extreme low temperatures

we know or found there in our cold chamber we can produce a thin film of ice and then after that expose them to a beam of electrons which are charged particles comparable to what comes in to Pluto's surface from space we find that when we U shine ultraviolet light or electrons on simple molecules before too long the simple molecules are broken apart and by natural processes they reassemble into more complex chemicals so far the colors we make in the lab from radiating these IES is uh is fairly close to what we see on Pluto there

are tones of yellow light brown up through fairly dark red and if we care the processing by ultraviolet light to an extreme degree uh the material actually turns black and this is almost the color of of pure carbon seeing how radiation transforms simple I into complex and colorful organic molecules should help interpret the close-up views of Pluto's surface that'll be sent back by New Horizons color translates to the duration of the exposure of these otherwise colorless IES over a year 10,000 years 10 million years that may in turn tell us more about the nature of

the exposure of Pluto's surface and even the age of Pluto's surface Dale Crookshank began observing Pluto back in 1976 now 39 years later he's ready for its closeup we can say that Pluto is chemically active chemically Dynamic we don't know yet if it's geologically active and dynamic but that's what new Horizons is going to tell us we've been surprised in that way before as we've passed other planetary bodies that we had thought were totally cold dead um inert worlds and find that there are geysers there are ice flows there are cracks and all kinds of

evidence for geological activity I can still remember the first time I saw Pluto in a telescope and it was just a little dot that you could barely see it will be amazing that within a period of hours it will be transformed from this tiny dot that I studied as an astronomer to this huge geologic world that will be able to see volcanoes and faults and ices and mountains and craters I mean it will be truly an amazing experience to see it transformed so from sophisticated lab experiments from exploring other worlds and from applying insights from

terrestrial processes what should we expect when we get to Pluto in July 2015 fact the only thing that would surprise me would be if we turned out not to be surprised but enjoying the scientific surprises to come means avoiding dangers on the last few million miles to Pluto that's next December 6th 2014 in Mission Control Alice Bowman and her team wait to get confirmation that New Horizons has exited what's called hibernation for 2/3 of its 3 billion mile Journey most spacecraft systems have been turned off saving wear and tear on the science instruments New Horizon

sends a simple signal once a week just to say I'm still AOK Alice's team has a unique way of showing spacecraft status when New Horizons is hibernating their bare mascot is safely asleep when the spacecraft wakes up they put on its party hat if all goes well this will be the 18th time spacecraft and Bear have woken up but December 2014 is different VIPs from NASA are on hand two film Crews document the action as Allan explains the benefits of hibernation um it lowers our cost because we don't need to have people babysitting the spacecraft

24/7 outside interest in New Horizons is building if all goes well New Horizons will stay awake flying by Pluto and in July 2015 and then returning data until October 2016 copy that thank you GNC tonight data trickles in and Alice has to wait to be certain New Horizons is fully awake we should be getting it momentarily it should be any minute now this is like watching paint dry I figure if I stare at the screen hard enough and packet five just came in there we go go P PN mom on Pluto 1 we have a

nominal wake up of the New Horizon spacecraft on its way to Pluto we're ready for our next leg of the journey was awake ah our bear he's going to be here for a while this is a shed day we have completed the cruise across 3 billion miles of space the spacecraft is now awake finally after 9 years I'm glad to see hibernation behind us and active Ops ahead onto Pluto but there are still hundreds of tasks to ensure a safe flyby in July 2015 January 27th New Horizons has been sending back technical data and all

seems fine but today is the first time Hal Weaver and Andy Chen will be seeing new science images I thought I saw it pop up here let's try that again Chang is lead scientist for the Lori camera Lori is used for navigation to find the targets and to correct the trajectory so we get to the right place at the right time voltages currents temperatures all look normal uh no error messages this is it uh let's let's check out the uh very first images and then Sharon right there Pete pixel 55 okay all right so there

they are let's look at the whole for project scientist Hal Weaver even the jump in size from one to two pixels was significant this is a real milestone in the New Horizons Mission the very first images of Pluto in the Pluto encounter year uh hadn't turned loran hadn't gotten any images since last summer last July but this is it this is the start of it AR she blue we really don't know what we're going to see that's what this mission is all about what is the surface of Pluto really like how big is it what

are the orbits really so it's nothing but delightful surprises coming for us but some of the surprises may not be quite so welcome as New Horizons get still closer to the Pluto system Lori will be able to identify small moons and possible rings that can't be seen from Earth John Spencer is leading the uaz campaign uaz stands for unknown hazards we may found new moons or even rings around Pluto and if we see anything like that we're going to want to determine whether it poses a threat to the spacecraft because if it does if there's

debris that we might run into that might damage or kill the spacecraft then we want to uh evaluate that Hazard and determine whether we should take any evasive action to find out just how vulnerable New Horizons might be to even tiny dust particles the mission sent samples of spacecraft components to the White Sands test range technicians at White Sands set up gun tests to assess how vulnerable New Horizon's outer covers and cables might be we went to two facilities that could shoot things into parts of models of the spacecraft while the results might look dangerous

the Mission has options to take evasive action one of the backup strategies we have if we feel we need give the spacecraft Extra Protection is that we Orient it so that the High Gain antenna here which is um literally pretty bulletproof and can protect the spacecraft is going to be facing forward in the ram Direction and this is ram in the sense of battering ram it's a direction in which stuff will be coming at us and ramming into the spacecraft and if that is facing forward then any dust particles that hit the spacecraft are most

likely to hit that antenna where they won't cause US problems and only a small part of the spacecraft around the edges is going to be exposed to those particles that would protect the guts of the spacecraft but limit the pointing of the cameras the cameras are fixed to the spacecraft so if the spacecraft has to point in One Direction the cameras can only point in a limited range of directions this limits the amount of times we can photograph the system as we go past because we can only photog objects when they're just in the right

angle that we can look at them while protecting the spacecraft with the main antenna another option is to take different trajectories through the Pluto system that's called the Shabbat play Shabbat is the best acronym in the space business it stands for Safe Haven by other trajectory and it is is the word we use to represent our backup plans at Pluto the second Shabbat takes us much closer to Pluto um into the region where atmospheric drag uh depletes orbits of any debris which we think would be uh the safest Hail Mary pass that we could fly

if we have to do something different than the nominal we are coming into the Pluto system with the ability if we learn something we don't expect to be able to make uh a change and uh and get the goods but those decisions can only be made in the last month before closest approach and there'll be limited time to evaluate the best options so in February 20 2015 Spencer's uaz team including ring specialist Mark shalter and postto Simon Porter are running through a Readiness test now they're on the clock and being scored for whether they can

work through the calculations fast enough to decide on a trajectory correction maneuver that might prevent loss of mission and that makes this exercise more critical than any that have gone before the difference between this and previous operational Readiness tests is is that this is where we have to demonstrate to the project of NASA that we can do this but the only test that really matters comes on July 14th 2015 that one day will pay off 26 years of dreams and 9 years in [Music] flight for the science team the year of Pluto began with another

meeting to review the latest data on the Pluto system and to hear updates on how the spacecraft was performing Mission manager Glenn Fountain who'd been with the project from its start summarized remaining risks red boxes are possibilities that could kill the mission but now in 2015 there are more and more green boxes risks that have been minimized something that we haven't thought of still might happen but I'm confident that whatever happens whatever fate throws at us this team will be able to resolve it and we'll go on to get wonderful data when we get to

Pluto we have a fantastically talented team of people who have worked very hard and we've tested the sequences inside and out and while there are always unknown unknowns I'm very confident and really looking forward to the curtain Rising along with mindbending technical details there also was a sense of history in the making to document the long years of effort to get this close to Pluto the mission recreated a team photograph taken in 2004 as Glenn Allan and Alice had carefully planned back then many of the scientists and Engineers were still actively engaged in New Horizons

and looking forward to July 2015 we have worked hard to get a coherent team because if you don't have a good team to operate the spacecraft to do the planning you will fail and so we worked a plan early in the mission to have younger people uh with the right amount of experience to be on the mission and it's just like watching your kids grow it's like all of a sudden where did the time go you know they are older they're more mature and they're now the the very experienced veterans but the hard work of

mission planning was by no means over even this close to encounter day while exploring Pluto in 2015 is exciting in itself New Horizons was recommended in part as a mission that might continue on farther out into the Kyper belt that takes identifying potential targets now for a still more distant flyby should NASA approve an extended Mission this challenging task was assigned to John Spencer Mark Buie and a team of young posts and like everything else about this Mission it wasn't easy Buie and John Spencer had been using Earth's largest telescopes in Hawaii and Chile but

even Earth's Best couldn't crack this task but the basic problem is the Earth's atmosphere is just a a mess at these scales there's a limit and that's what we've been beating our heads against now with time running out we had to turn to Hubble and so it's we sort of not so jokingly talk about Hubble to the rescue without Hubble we would not have these objects Mark and his young collaborators came up with Innovative search techniques using custom software what that does is makes the Stars smear out and makes the Kyper Bel objects hold still

it's been a lot of work but to do something as exciting as this has been just so much fun I've been plugging through the data today because it's fresh data and I just really really wanted to to know what the answer was well we would have been in big trouble if we didn't find the kbo in time so there was this pressure but honestly we had the best people in the world working on the problem and we did it and we just do the math write the software crunch the pixels and then I create this

graphic and from that point on it's what I call wetwear it's what you got in your head in reality kbos are moving against the fixed Stars Mark came up with a way of making them more obvious by flipping that around and making the stars appear to move and any kbos stand still right in the middle there's something that's just holding dead constant and that's the Kyper belt option you can't argue with that it was a high- tech variant of the approach that had been instrumental in exploring the Pluto system right from the start but at

the core it's a technique that hasn't really changed since tombow's day you have two pictures of the sky taken in different times and you're looking for the stuff that moves as soon as you see something real there is absolutely no question about it as soon as it flashes on the screen in just a millisecond there it is it's real and you know I found another kyber bolt object but finding a kbo is only half the battle is it located where New Horizons can reach it with available fuel once you have the orbit then we and

we know where the spacecraft is and where it's going to be we can figure out how much fuel the spacecraft is going to need to use to get to the these objects with more Hubble time New Horizons got a pleasant surprise it looked like we might actually have to burn the engines to miss the object which was pretty exciting concept you know it's good thing we looked cuz you wouldn't want to run into one of these things these cold classicals they're pretty much as they were 4.5 billion years ago they're little fossils that's incredible we

have no idea what they're going to look like so with potential targets found at last it was on the Pluto I'm feeling pretty exhilarated at this point you know you're at the top of the roller coaster you were about to go down that dizzying thrilling uh ride into the system just seeing Pluto there getting bigger and bigger it's gives me goosebumps today we're only a few months away from the en counter we're less than an astronomical unit the distance between the Earth and the Sun that distance away from this fascinating object it's the last major

body in our solar system that we really need to visit to be putting the Capstone on the initial reconnaissance of the solar system it's heartwarming and it it feels like something that makes a career worthwhile as spacecraft goes New Horizons is a very small team but still we've been working on this for over a decade and you add it all up and it's about 2 and 1/2 million work hours to get ourselves to Pluto we have waited first the four years that we couldn't hardly think about because we were running so fast and then it

is oh we wait and we wait and now we are ready to begin the encounter we have had delayed gratification the year of Pluto is you know simultaneously a beginning and an ending um it's an ending in that we are uh completing our objective we're accomplishing the flyby of the Pluto system for the first time but it's also the beginning of a whole new chapter for science of really being able to explore these objects as the data comes down over a period of months you know in bringing in postdocs and the younger scientists who some

of them were in high school when we started this project and now they have their phds and they are spectacular experts and and very talented at what they do I was in preschool when Allan first started talking about a Pluto mission and finishing high school and starting College when it was built and in grad school for the cruise having young people come into these programs gaining The Experience they're going to be the next generation of explorers we've never been to a kbo we've never been anywhere close to a kbo this this is the the most

unexplored area of the entire solar system which is in other wayse saying this is the most unknown area that we as humans can reach with spacecraft we can't wait to get to Pluto and to July 14th and see what the surface looks like we're ready to go and it's showtime we are capable of continuing an adventure that Humanity began 100,000 years ago as our ancestors Walked Out Of Africa and we are continuing that exploration and this country is in the Forefront of doing that [Music]