New Horizons phoned home Tuesday evening to let MOM know everything is a-OK. “We have a healthy spacecraft, we’ve recorded data from the Pluto system and we’re outbound from Pluto,” mission operations manager, or MOM, Alice Bowman reported from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. “In layman terms, the spacecraft is happy. And it was very happy to go on and collect more science.”
The little spacecraft that has traveled more than 3 billion miles through deep space over the last 9½ years Tuesday, traveling at more than 30,000 miles per hour.
It’s been radio silent since Monday at 9:17 p.m., using its energy for science — pointing its instruments at Pluto and its moon Charon to collect data on its one-time trip through Pluto’s system.
The signal reporting that all New Horizons’ systems were “nominal” was sent from the spacecraft to Earth at about 2:20 p.m. and received at 6:52 p.m. by NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna station near Madrid, Spain.
Although the probability was low, there was always a slight danger that New Horizons could be lost on its journey through Pluto’s system. Even hitting a space pellet the size of a grain of rice could destroy the spacecraft.
It was true exploration into the unknown.
“We were all completely confident that our little robot would make it through the Pluto system safely, but still, the relief is palpable,” Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) Alex Parker said from mission control Tuesday night. “Everyone is eager to find out what New Horizons saw during the flyby.”
SwRI’s Boulder-based planetary science division is the homebase of New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, who started the push to explore Pluto in the late 1980s.
, from the Lockheed Martin-built Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator powering the spacecraft’s seven science instruments, to the dark, radiation-absorbing coating used on New Horizons’ imaging instrument Alice developed by Custom Microwave in Longmont.
Additionally, the spacecraft’s Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, or SDC, which assesses space-dust particles, was made by University of Colorado students, Louisville-based Sierra Nevada Space Systems created components for New Horizons’ thermal control system, and created Ralph.
New Horizons’ instruments collected the expected amount of science data on the fly-by, Bowman reported. Most of it will be stored on board New Horizons and downlinked to Earth beginning in September, providing what Stern calls a “16-month data waterfall.”
Just to be safe, the New Horizons science team downlinked “fail-safe data sets” from each area of the spacecraft’s study.
“There’s a little bit of drama because this is true exploration,” Stern said. “New Horizons is flying into the unknown.”
This data is expected to bring new and exciting discoveries that will essentially render obsolete what we currently think we know about Pluto.
The discoveries are already happening.
“We didn’t know if there would be craters on the surface of Pluto … but because of the rapid pace of approach, suddenly ‘boom!’ We had topography,” Parker said. “Somehow it just became a real place.”
Scientists have thus far deduced that Pluto is about 1,500 miles across with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere. It has craters, peaks and ridges, and there is evidence of surface impacts from space objects as well as evidence of current or previous tectonic activity.
“I think the biggest discovery for me is that Pluto has a complicated geological history,” said , who heads up the mission’s geology and geophysics areas. “That’s really basic information about Pluto that we had no idea about before yesterday … Is it an ancient surface or a young surface? And now we see maybe it’s both.”
Data reveals it also snows on Pluto, and that the dwarf planet is the largest object in the Kuiper Belt — an icy debris field extending into space from Neptune’s orbit.
And, in what’s possibly the most fascinating aspect of the 9½ -year-long wait, the data the team receives Wednesday will make Tuesday’s data obsolete, Spencer said.
“Tomorrow’s pictures will be nearly 10 times better than today’s,” he said. “We also get our first decent views of the small moons, Nix and Hydra, which up to now have been little more than just points of light … We get a better view of (Pluto’s moon) Charon as well, about twice as good as we have up until now. There’s stuff coming thick and fast from now on.”
New images and data from the fly-by are expected to be released by NASA on Wednesday.
“If you think it was big today, wait until tomorrow and the next day,” said NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
New Horizons’ work may continue for decades as it travels deeper into the Kuiper Belt.
A SwRI team has identified two objects in the Kuiper Belt that warrant further exploration, and will soon decide which one they will head toward for a flyby in early 2019. Then they will attempt to secure NASA funding for an extended mission.
“These objects that we could fly by later are like the building blocks that Pluto, and other worlds like it, were made of. And they may even be the building blocks that even the giant planets were made of,” Spencer said. “This is going right back to the origins of our solar system out there in the Kuiper Belt.”
Stern estimates the spacecraft could continue its mission for another 20 years.
Laura Keeney: 303-954-1337, lkeeney@denverpost.com or twitter.com/LauraKeeney
