[And
so, it was possible to say in that moment, was science. A decade of missed
sleep, holidays and family time, a great adventure in persistence, ingenuity
and vision had paid off in data that would keep coming down for the next year
and a half. Not only will the information provide a better view of Pluto’s
“heart,” but perhaps clues to the origin of the planets and solar system, frozen
and stored all these eons out there in the ice cube tray of the gods.]
By
Dennis Overbye
 |
The area seen here, from the
bottom right part of the dwarf planet near its
'heart' is 150 miles across, and shows areas 1.5 mile across |
In
a feat of Einsteinian navigation, they caught up, four and a half hours later, with
a spacecraft named New Horizons that was speeding past Plutoat 30,000 miles per
hour and was ready to phone home. The craft had just slipped into the shadow of
the dwarf planet and turned around to look back at the Earth through Pluto’s
atmosphere.
It
was an extraordinary time for a cosmic selfie, a historic day in space and here
on Earth.
It
will be left to historians of future decades to decide whether President Obama
made the right choice in deciding to talk to his enemies rather than to bomb
them.
And
so, it was possible to say in that moment, was science. A decade of missed
sleep, holidays and family time, a great adventure in persistence, ingenuity
and vision had paid off in data that would keep coming down for the next year
and a half. Not only will the information provide a better view of Pluto’s
“heart,” but perhaps clues to the origin of the planets and solar system, frozen
and stored all these eons out there in the ice cube tray of the gods.
In
the audience at a news conference here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory, where the spacecraft was built and operated, were a handful of
children, Plutokids, born on the day New Horizons was launched: Jan. 19,
2006 . Invited to ask
a question, one 9-year-old asked about the mission of New Horizons.
That
was a good question.
If
all goes well, New Horizons will continue traveling outward to encounter other
denizens of the Kuiper belt, the vast zone of icy wreckage beyond the known
planets. But the larger question is what this generation of Plutokids and their
peers can look forward to.
With
this trip to Pluto, S. Alan Stern, the leader of New Horizons mission, said, humans
have now visited all the known worlds, the starry crib into which we were born.
William
Sanford Nye, better known as Bill Nye the Science Guy, the chief executive of
the Planetary Society, offered his own view. Lacking the will or the resources
or the patience to launch an interstellar probe to, say, Alpha Centauri, a star
4.5 light-years and a human lifetime away (assuming we could achieve a tenth
the speed of light, which is about 20,000 times the speed of New Horizons), Mr.
Nye said it might behoove us to look again at our origins and see them for the
first time.
Asked
whether he agreed with Dr. Stern that New Horizons was the “capstone” of our
reconnaissance of the solar system, Mr. Nye said he preferred to think of the
Pluto flyby as having kick-started a new phase of exploration, a search for the
end of cosmic loneliness.
“I
really want to find life,” he said. “Because if we find life, it would change
the course of human history.”
And
there are many possible venues in which we might find cosmic companionship, in
the form of microbes or better: the ocean under the ice of Europa; the warm, salty
geysers spitting from the Saturnian moon Enceladus; and underneath the ever-beckoning
sands of Mars.
It
could be, especially in the case of Mars, that we find out we are too late, and
our putative cousins have already gone extinct. Or we might find out that we
are they, blown from one formerly Edenic rock to another by a primordial
asteroid blast. We might find out we know nothing about the various forms life
might take and won’t even recognize our new friends.
We
know from the Kepler spacecraft, another instance of technology, grit and
vision that took years to reach fruition, that the Milky Way probably contains
billions of potentially habitable planets. What are the odds that life evolves?
John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut and the head of NASA’s space science
directorate, mused here recently: If the odds are a million to one, that still
leaves thousands of chances. If they are higher? Nobody knows, but perhaps we
will learn — an effort that could easily take a generation.
From
England
