December 31, 2015Looking Back at the ‘Year of Pluto’

New Horizons Project Manager Glen Fountain gives a Pluto flyby assessment during a press conference on July 14, 2015. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will mark New Year’s some 125 million miles beyond Pluto, far removed from the excitement and activity that accompanied its historic flight through the Pluto system just five months ago.

The intrepid probe continues to send volumes of pictures and other data from the July 14 encounter – stashed on its digital recorders – over a radio link to Earth stretching billions of miles. And as the pictures reach home, they remind us that 2015 was the year a small world on the planetary frontier captured our hearts, thanks to a determined and inspired team of government, academic and commercial partners determined to expand the frontiers of science and explore an entirely new realm of the solar system.

“What an amazing year, and an amazing experience,” said Glen Fountain, the New Horizons project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. “The New Horizons team worked so hard for so long, and to see it all come together was incredible.”

“The year 2015 had been in our team’s future for so long, it’s hard to believe that it’s soon to be in our past,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “But what a year it was – we explored Pluto, and made history doing it; we showed that first-time exploration of new planets gets a viral popular response from the public; and we found that small planets can be as complex as big ones like Mars.

“So while 2015 may be over, we’re not done on New Horizons,” he continued. “We’ll be receiving new data every week until at least October 2016, and as a result the exploration of the Pluto system continues even as we fly farther into the Kuiper Belt!”

As the Encounter Began . . .

This movie was made from images taken Jan. 25-31, 2015, as part of a New Horizons optical navigation campaign to better refine the locations of Pluto and Charon in preparation for the spacecraft’s close encounter with the small planet and its five moons. (Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI)

New Horizons began its long-awaited encounter with Pluto in January – nine years after launch – entering the first of several approach phases that culminated with the first close-up flyby of the Pluto system six months later.

A long-range photo shoot that began Jan. 25 provided mission scientists with a continually improving look at the dynamics of Pluto and its moons – and those images played a critical role in navigating the spacecraft across the remaining 135 million miles (220 million kilometers) to Pluto, and helping mission scientists search for debris that might have impeded New Horizons at flyby.

Over the next few months, the onboard Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (known as LORRI) took hundreds of pictures of Pluto against star fields to refine the team’s estimates of New Horizons’ distance to Pluto. Though the Pluto system resembled little more than bright dots in the camera’s view until May, mission navigators used those pictures to design course-correction maneuvers and aim the spacecraft toward its flyby target point.

This illustration shows some of the final images used to determine that the coast was clear for New Horizons’ flight through the Pluto system. These images show the difference between two sets of 48 combined 10-second exposures with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken June 26, 2015, from a range of 21.5 million kilometers (approximately 13 million miles) to Pluto. (Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI)

In April the team added several significant observations of the Pluto system, including the first color and spectral observations of Pluto and its moons, and the first ultraviolet observations to study the surface and atmosphere of Pluto and the surface of its largest moon, Charon. New Horizons also started the series of long-exposure images designed to help the team spot additional moons or rings in the Pluto system – which they never did find.

After seven weeks of detailed searches for dust clouds, rings, and other potential hazards, the New Horizons team decided the spacecraft would remain on its original path through the Pluto system instead of making a late course correction to detour around any hazards. Because New Horizons was traveling at approximately 31,000 miles (about 50,000 kilometers) per hour, a particle as small as a grain of rice could have been lethal.

Pluto shows two remarkably different sides in these color images of the planet and its largest moon, Charon, taken by New Horizons on June 25 and June 27, 2015. (Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI)

Mission officials breathed a collective sigh of relief. "Not finding new moons or rings present is a bit of a scientific surprise to most of us," Stern said on July 1. "But as a result, no engine burn is needed to steer clear of potential hazards … We are 'go' for the best of our planned Pluto encounter trajectories."

By then, Pluto was also starting to come into clearer view. The distinct “faces” of both Pluto and Charon were becoming apparent, including Pluto’s now-famous heart shaped plain named Tombaugh Regio.

A Mission Save

Watch the New Horizons team prepare for its historic encounter with Pluto in “The Year of Pluto.”

New Horizons had traveled farther than any spacecraft to reach its primary target – and while it spent about two-thirds of that long journey in hibernation, the team was designing and practicing every maneuver and science operation of the Pluto encounter, and getting to know its spacecraft inside and out.

That preparation paid off just before the flyby. On July 4, while attempting to process commands sent from home and compress stored science data at the same time, the spacecraft’s main computer overloaded and, as designed, switched to its backup processor. This put New Horizons into a “safe mode” where it stopped performing science, pointed to Earth and quietly awaited word from operators on the next move.

Guests and New Horizons team members count down to the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

The recovery was fast and thorough; mission engineers immediately identified the problem and reestablished contact within two hours. By July 7, the intricate set of flyby commands – the critical directions for New Horizons’ science instruments – was reloaded and ready to go.

“Looking back over the last year, there are many things that stand out, but the most revealing to me is the awesome power of a team,” said APL’s Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager. “In my opinion, it was and continues to be the reason for the huge success of New Horizons. As exemplified by New Horizons, a team is so much more than the sum of its members.”

Celebrating Science and Exploration

Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons, taken on July 13, 2015, when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. This is the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto on July 14. The color image has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument that was acquired earlier on July 13. (Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI)

New Horizons mission central, for the week of July 12-18, was the Kossiakoff Center at APL. Nearly 250 members of the media, 1,600 guests and hundreds of staff were on hand for panel discussions, press conferences and related activities; a full NASA TV set was built on the auditorium floor for the flyby coverage that was broadcast and webcast to the world.

New Horizons was actually out of contact with Earth during its closest approach to Pluto at approximately 7:50 a.m. EDT on July 14. But the team, joined by guests and an international TV audience, marked the flyby with a raucous countdown that rivaled New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Network morning shows beamed live images of U.S. flags waving and cheers and hugs around the room. Later that morning the team revealed a stunning, immediately iconic image of Pluto, the last photo New Horizons took and transmitted before entering flyby silence.

Watch Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman and the operations team confirm the success of the Pluto flyby on July 14, 2015.

But the most critical transmission on July 14 didn’t include a picture; it was the burst of telemetry, set to arrive in the New Horizons Mission Operations Center just before 9 p.m., indicating the spacecraft was healthy and did its job. The suspense was short-lived, as the transmission – sent from New Horizons more than four hours earlier – came right on time. “We have carrier lock,” announced mission operations chief Bowman, meaning NASA’s Deep Space Network had linked up to New Horizons.

Then came the telemetry, sparking applause in Mission Ops. After a quick poll of the spacecraft systems team – where all indicated New Horizons was “green” – Bowman made the call: “We have a healthy spacecraft, we have collected all the data, and we are outbound from Pluto.”

A jubilant Stern burst into the room, hugged Bowman and started a cheer of “U-S-A, U-S-A” among the ops team. He was followed by APL Director Ralph Semmel, NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld and Administrator Charles Bolden, who all offered congratulations.

Bowman, after the hugs and handshakes, looked around the room. “This is just fantastic,” she said. “Just like we planned it, just like we practiced. We did it!”

Bowman then led the operations team on a walk to the packed Kossiakoff Center auditorium, where they and the rest of the New Horizons team received a standing ovation to kick off a press conference that more resembled a Super Bowl celebration. All that was missing was a trophy and a call from the White House – though President Obama did tweet his congratulations to NASA and the team.

“Inspiration like that provided by New Horizons will keep interest strong for the next generation to make their own giant leaps,” Bolden said to open the press conference. “This is a historic win for science and exploration.”

The first close-up pictures, showing Pluto’s surface and some of its moons in incredible detail, came back the next day. Over the next several days the science team, camped out at APL since June, scoured data and images of Pluto that revealed nitrogen ice flowing across the surface, mountain ranges that rival the Rockies, and areas that might still be geologically active.

Other results since then – which have already been included in peer-reviewed journal articles and presented at two major science meetings, the American Geophysical Union and AAS Division for Planetary Sciences – are revealing Pluto and its moons to be unexpectedly complex and beautiful, yet unlike any worlds we’ve ever encountered in our solar system.

Members of the New Horizons science team react to seeing the spacecraft's last and sharpest image of Pluto before closest approach later in the day, July 14, 2015 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Still, for science team member Fran Bagenal, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, the magical public reaction to the images of Pluto remains a favorite memory. “Pluto has always been a favorite planet for many people – particularly kids. But when I show the images to friends, relatives and public audiences, everyone just smiles, shakes their heads and says, ‘Wow! That’s so cool!’”

Exploration on the Frontier

Pluto’s Popularity
Not only was the Pluto flyby front-page news around the world in July, New Horizons’ exploration of Pluto was a top story for many publications at year’s end:

On Nov. 4, the New Horizons team completed the last of four targeting maneuvers that set the spacecraft on course for a Jan. 1, 2019 encounter with 2014 MU69. This ancient body in the Kuiper Belt is more than a billion miles beyond Pluto; New Horizons will explore it if NASA approves an extended mission.

The maneuvers were the most distant trajectory corrections ever performed by any spacecraft; they also were the mission's largest and longest, and carried out in a succession faster than any sequence of previous New Horizons engine burns. And they were incredibly accurate, performing almost exactly as they were designed and setting New Horizons on the course mission designers predicted.

The science team hopes to explore even closer to MU69 than New Horizons came to Pluto on July 14, which was approximately 7,750 miles. The team will submit its proposal for an extended mission in April.

“New Horizons was a once-in-a-lifetime mission, and it felt as if that lifetime – all the decades of proposing, building, planning and flying – got compressed into those July days of intense excitement and the astonishment at the results,” said Joel Parker, a New Horizons co-investigator from SwRI. “ I feel incredibly lucky to have been a part of this event that simultaneously brings to the end five decades of solar system ‘first’ explorations, and starts a new epoch of exploring further reaches of the solar system; we didn't even know that ‘third zone,’ the Kuiper Belt, existed when humans started to send spacecraft to explore the planets. It makes me wonder: What new places in our solar system will we discover in the next 50 years?”

Incredible Aim

Timing and accuracy were critical for all New Horizons flyby observations, since commands for the science observations were stored in the spacecraft’s computers and programmed to “execute” at exact times. To guide New Horizons to the right place and time the team used a combination of radio-tracking data of the spacecraft and, in the months before the flyby, range-to-Pluto measurements made by optical navigation images of Pluto taken by New Horizons itself.

So after 9.5 years and 3 billion miles, how did they do? How about just 90 seconds and 100 miles from their projected target. “We did so well, I almost don’t believe it,” Project Manager Glen Fountain said. “We were aiming for a 60-by-90 mile box [near Pluto], and we almost flew right through the center of it. That’s like hitting a hole-in-one from New York to Los Angeles.”

Watch: Glen Fountain describes how the team will “thread the needle” at Pluto.