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On July 4, 2015,
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a NASA spacecraft called New Horizons
was 5 billion kilometers away from Earth.
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It was only 10 days away from Pluto,
after flying for 9.5 years,
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when it suddenly dropped out of contact.
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But let’s back up a little.
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As of 1989,
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mankind had successfully sent craft
to every known planet in the solar system
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except one—Pluto.
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You may have heard that astronomers
don’t consider Pluto
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or its brethren to be planets.
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However, most planetary
scientists still do,
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which is why we're using
that terminology here.
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There’s a limited amount
we can learn about Pluto from Earth
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because it’s so far from us.
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Pluto, however, is a scientific goldmine.
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It’s located in a region
called the Kuiper Belt,
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home to many small planets,
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hundreds of thousands
of ancient icy objects,
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and trillions of comets.
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This mysterious region holds clues
to the formation of our solar system,
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and it was long,
tantalizingly beyond our reach.
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Until New Horizons.
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Its objectives: explore Pluto,
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collect as much scientific
data as possible,
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transmit it back to Earth,
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then explore farther out
in the Kuiper Belt.
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To achieve this, the New Horizons team
outfitted their craft
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with seven state-of-the-art
scientific instruments.
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Those included Ralph,
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a set of cameras powerful enough
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to capture features the size
of city blocks in Manhattan
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from tens of thousands of kilometers away.
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And REX, designed to use radio waves
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to measure Pluto’s atmospheric pressure
and temperature.
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All of the onboard equipment had to be
built to be both reliable and lightweight
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because New Horizons had an
additional challenge;
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it had to reach its target
as fast as possible.
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Why?
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Around 2020, Pluto will reach
a point in its orbit
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where its atmosphere could freeze.
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And due to the tilt of its axis,
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more and more of Pluto’s surface
is shrouded in darkness every year.
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Pluto completes a full orbit
once every 248 Earth years,
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so it would be a long wait
for the next prime opportunity to visit.
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To see how New Horizons
got to Pluto in time,
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let’s jump to its launch.
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Its three rocket stages accelerated
New Horizons to such great speeds
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that it crossed the 400,000 kilometers
to the moon in just nine hours.
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About a year later,
the craft reached Jupiter
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and got what’s called a gravity assist.
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That’s where it flies close enough
to the gas giant
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to receive a gravitational
slingshot effect.
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New Horizons was then flying
at around 50,000 kilometers per hour,
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as it would for the next eight years
to cross the remaining gulf to Pluto.
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Going at such an astonishing speed
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meant that slowing down
to get into orbit or land
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would’ve been impossible.
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That’s why New Horizons was on
a flyby mission,
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where it would get just one chance to
scream by Pluto and make its observations.
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The flyby would have
to be fully automated,
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since at that distance, any signals
to guide it from Earth
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would take 4.5 hours to reach it.
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So the team loaded the ship’s computer
with a series of thousands of commands,
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called the core load,
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that would begin to execute
when the craft was 6.5 days from Pluto.
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But when New Horizons
was just ten days out,
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disaster almost struck.
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Ground control lost contact
with the spacecraft.
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After two nerve-wracking hours,
New Horizons came back online,
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but mission control discovered
that its main computer had rebooted,
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losing the entire core load
and other critical data.
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Without that, it would soon
whizz by Pluto
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with virtually nothing
to show for the mission.
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Alice Bowman,
the mission’s Operations Manager,
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led a team for 72 sleepless hours
to get the instructions
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loaded back into New Horizons in time.
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Without room for a single error,
she and her team pulled it off,
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and New Horizons began taking
and broadcasting breathtaking images.
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Those observations have revealed
a delightfully varied world,
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with ground fogs,
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high altitude hazes,
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possible clouds,
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canyons,
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towering mountains,
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faults,
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craters,
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polar caps,
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glaciers,
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apparent dune fields,
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suspected ice volcanoes,
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evidence for past flowing liquids,
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and more.
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One of the most exciting discoveries
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is the 1000-kilometer-wide
Sputnik Planitia glacier.
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Sputnik Planitia is mainly composed
of slowly churning frozen nitrogen,
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and we’ve never seen anything
like it in our solar system.
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The exploration of Pluto
was a great success,
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but New Horizons isn’t done yet.
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On January 1, 2019,
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it’ll break its own record for
furthest explored object
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when it visits a Kuiper Belt Object
called 2014 MU69,
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which is orbiting the sun another billion
kilometers farther away than Pluto.
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The world is holding its breath
to see what it’ll find there.8135
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