Martha Visits Every Monday and Just Stays Until Noon, Period. It’s the phrase school children use to memorize our solar system’s planetary order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Now the New Horizons spacecraft could rewrite that sentence and much of what we presume about Pluto. Topping the list of questions to be answered is whether tiny, icy Pluto is truly a planet or just one of many astronomical objects buzzing about a far-off area called the Kuiper Belt. Oddly, while Pluto was discovered seven decades ago, we know very little about it, as no spacecraft has ever visited it.
Until now. The piano-sized New Horizons blasted off yesterday on its nine-year journey to the edge of the solar system. Pluto is so far from Earth that photos taken from the orbiting Hubble telescope show little more than light and shadow. New Horizons thus could fulfill the poet’s exhortation “to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bounds of human thought.”
But as far away as the tiny planet is, the effort to explore it has taken place remarkably close to home. More people from Colorado have worked on the New Horizons project than from any other state.
Special credits are due principle investigator Alan Stern and deputy project scientist Leslie Young, both from the Boulder unit of Southwest Research Institute Department of Space Studies. Lockheed Martin Corp.’s employees in Jefferson County built the rocket that carried the craft into space. Boulder-based Ball Aerospace built one of the mission’s cameras. University of Colorado students built one of the spacecraft’s important scientific instruments, and CU scientists Fran Bagenal and Mihaly Horanyi are among the project’s co-investigators.
For these scientists, and humanity as a whole, it’s an exciting moment in space exploration.
“Exploring Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is like conducting an archeological dig into the history of the outer solar system, a place where we can peek into the ancient era of planetary formation,” Stern has said.
But since the public may have trouble grasping Pluto’s quirks, here’s a whimsical way to think about the ninth planet:
It’s so far from the solar system’s core that sunlight takes half a day to reach it, yet astronomers still call it “near” space. Or put it this way: The 3 billion miles between the sun and Pluto is closer than any member of Congress now wants to be to former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Our moon always shows the Earth the same face, but Earth displays a different face to the moon at different times.
By contrast, Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, twirl so they always show each other the same face. With that kind of cosmic pirouette, perhaps Pluto and Charon should try out for the next episode of “Dancing with the Stars.”
