Cape Canaveral, Fla. – The New Horizons spacecraft blasted off Thursday afternoon from Kennedy Space Center, launching NASA’s long- awaited first mission to Pluto after two days of weather delays and two decades of political and financial wrangling.
The 196-foot launch vehicle lifted off at exactly 2 p.m. Eastern time, sending out a thunderous rumble heard miles away and leaving a fiery trail and a plume of smoke in its wake. More than 1,000 Colorado workers had their hands on the mission, and about $200 million of the $700 million price tag will eventually be spent on projects led by Colorado organizations.
New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It will reach speeds of 45,000 mph, or about 12 miles per second, during its nearly decade-long journey to Pluto, the solar system’s only unexplored planet.
“It will be a fantastic journey,” said Andrew Cheng, a physicist with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md., and project leader of one of the spacecraft’s scientific instruments. “This mission was canceled three times between 1993 and 2002, but they can’t get us now.”
Scientists hope details about Pluto and the mysterious Kuiper Belt region of icy objects will provide insight into the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. They say objects in the region have remained relatively unchanged.
“This is an historical achievement for the United States of America,” said Boulder’s Alan Stern, the mission’s lead scientist and principal investigator.
The piano-sized probe is carrying seven instruments that will be used to study Pluto, two of which came from Colorado organizations. Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder built a camera, and students at the University of Colorado at Boulder built a dust counter.
“It was very exhilarating,” said Chelsey Bryant, one of about 30 CU students who worked on the counter. She got teary-eyed after the launch, the result of “a lot of pent-up anticipation.”
About 1,000 Lockheed Martin Corp. employees at its Waterton Canyon plant in Jefferson County built the Atlas V rocket that sent the probe into orbit.
“Being a part of something that’s so exciting historically, it’s irreplaceable,” said Vanessa Bates, a Lockheed systems engineer from Jefferson County who was part of an estimated 500 people who worked to get the rocket launched Thursday.
About two dozen workers in Colorado will continue to work on the project during New Horizons’ 3-billion-mile voyage.
Pluto is the smallest planet in the solar system and farthest from the sun. Lowell Observatory astronomer Clyde Tombaugh identified Pluto on Feb. 18, 1930, the first planet discovered by an American. New Horizons will begin to study the Pluto system five months before its closest approach to the planet. Once the craft is about 65 million miles from Pluto – about three months before the closest flyby – its images of the planet will be better than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.
In the weeks before the closest approach, the mission team will be able to observe Pluto’s weather by comparing images of the planet over time. As early as July 2015, the craft will come within 6,200 miles of Pluto and will begin to take high-resolution images of the planet.
The launch was delayed twice this week because of cloudy conditions. Thursday’s successful launch proved Stern prophetic.
“Most of Pluto’s long-held secrets remain secrets – guarded by the depths of distance between us and that ancient, icy little world,” he wrote in his book about the planet and its moon, “Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System,” published in 1998.
“To see the solar system’s ninth sister as she really is, we must go to her. And amazingly, our species has developed the will, and the way, to do just that. So guard your secrets while you can, Pluto! We are coming.”
Staff writer Andy Vuong can be reached at 303-820-1209 or avuong@denverpost.com.
