Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Chasing New Horizons to Pluto with Alan Stern and David Grinspoon

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

The New Horizons mission was a triumph, revealing Pluto as an utterly unique and beautiful world. But the mission first had to survive challenge after challenge, fighting to be developed, meeting a nearly impossible launch deadline, and then narrowly avoiding disaster when it was barely a week from its destination. The entire dramatic tale has now been told by Principal Investigator Alan Stern and his co-author, astrobiologist David Grinspoon.  They join Mat Kaplan to talk about their book, Chasing New Horizons—Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto.  A signed copy of the book will go to the winner of this episode’s space trivia contest.  Emily Lakdawalla has returned from an international gathering of Mercury scientists with a special report.  The Planetary Society’s Senior Editor also marks the launch of a Chinese lunar orbiter.  Learn more about this week’s topics and see images here: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0523-stern-grinspoon-chasing-new-horizons.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chasing New Horizons to Pluto, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Alan Stern is back. The leader of the New Horizons journey to Pluto has co-written a dramatic chronicle of that mission with astrobiologist and science communicator David Grinspoon. They'll join me at the famous Griffith Observatory

right after we check in with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Then stay with us for the first of several opportunities to win a signed edition of Alan and David's great book when Bruce Betts presents this week's What's Up Space Trivia Contest. Emily, you have this long piece about a Mercury meeting that you attended. It is classic Laktawalla reporting. Tell us about, first of all, BepiColombo, the mission that'll be leaving before too long for Mercury. Yes, this is an exciting mission, exciting in part because it will only be the third mission ever to visit Mercury. I wonder if we should count it though as the third and fourth mission because there's actually separate spacecraft, two of them built by the European

Space Agency and one by the Japanese Space Agency. They will take nearly a decade to get to Mercury and then enter into separate orbits there. The Japanese one is focused on the magnetosphere and the exosphere, and the European one is focused more close in on topography and geology and all the other stuff that you need to do close into a planet. It's going to be a really powerful follow-on to the initial reconnaissance of the Messenger mission, which ended a few years ago. We should remind people, it's really hard to get to Mercury without falling into the Sun, slowing down enough to go into orbit. Yeah, it's really difficult because Mercury is very deep in the Sun's gravity well. And so,

I don't know if you guys can remember that kind of game where you roll a coin at, usually there are these donation things at museums and you roll a coin in it and it goes faster and faster and faster as it circles the drain. It's kind of like that. And it's really difficult to slow a spacecraft enough to let Mercury's relatively small gravity grab it. So it winds up taking nearly as long to get to Mercury as it does to get to Pluto. I've lost a lot of nickels and quarters to those gravity wells in museums. So this was kind of the inspiration, I guess, for this meeting that you attended. We won't be able to go into much of the science, but tell us why people got together. Well, it was a good opportunity. A few

years after the end of the Messenger mission, the Messenger team has a pretty good handle on what we learned from the Messenger mission and what we didn't learn, the major open questions. So there are some cool things that we've learned about Mercury, like the fact that it's shrunk quite a bit more than was initially estimated. It's actually shrunk by seven or eight kilometers over the course of its cooling lifetime. We found out that it has a really quite large liquid outer core that is generating its interesting magnetic field. And we found out that it's had volcanic activity in relatively recent time, although its major volcanic activity was pretty old, around 3.5 or longer billion years ago. We still have a lot of questions about how its magnetic field is generated. MESSENGER only really mapped the northern hemisphere of Mercury, at least in terms of topography and gravity and details of composition. And so BepiColombo will be able to

get much more detailed and much more thorough global maps. It's really going to be able to answer a lot of outstanding questions, but very likely, science being what it is, we'll have just as many new questions to answer by the end of the BepiColombo mission. All right. I got to ask you about one more thing that you wrote up in this May 17 blog entry, and that is about the ice, apparently water ice, quite a bit of it on this planet that's so close to the sun. This was actually something that we knew about even before Messenger got there, because you can see this brightly radar reflective stuff at Mercury's poles using Arecibo. The messenger mission confirmed that there is water ice up there in the permanently shadowed craters near both of Mercury's poles. But it's kind of interesting. It's got this sort of patchy

distribution. Some of the ice is very pure. And one of the science presentations at the meeting posited the hypothesis that maybe all the ice was delivered with one big impact, possibly the one that generated the Hokusai crater, which has this beautiful, huge, long system of rays crossing the entire face of Mercury that wasn't visible to Mariner 10. So it was a really nice surprise to the scientists. It's a great piece. Very, very thorough. And you've got two more here. Well, one from you based on work by somebody else and one from a new contributor to the Planetary Society blog. Tell us about 11 perijovs.

This was a really neat thing that an amateur put together. I love having the opportunity to quickly visualize an entire dataset. And what Sean Doran put together is this really beautiful sequence showing basically all of the JunoCam images of Jupiter to date. And it really helps you pick out, oh, which ones would I want to go see? Would I want to go explore in more detail? And so it's just a really nice montage of all the JunoCam data. That's a May 18 entry at planetary.org. And then finally, on May 19, something from China about its new lunar orbiter, and I am very consciously going to allow you to say the name. We're talking about the first launch in the Chang'e 4 mission. There are two spacecraft.

One is a relay orbiter that they need in order to be able to speak to the future lander that's going to be landing on the far side of the moon where we wouldn't be able to have regular radio communications. So this first orbiter that they launched is named Chit Chow. It's named after a Chinese folktale about a magpie bridge that forms once a year to reunite two lovers who are otherwise separated. And it was a conscious metaphor for the fact that Chie Chiao will be serving as a bridge between the Chang'e 4 lander and Earth. It looks like the launch went just fine. There haven't been a lot of updates from China, but hopefully I'll have another article from Lu Yuan Chu about this mission as it approaches its insertion into the L2 halo orbit in about two months.

And when does the lander leave for the moon? The date has always been set at about December 2018. It's looking like it might be delayed a little bit to like early 2019. The thing about the moon is that you can launch pretty much whenever you want. There's usually a once-a-month launch opportunity to get the lighting that you want. So if you need to delay a little bit to be real sure that your spacecraft is going to work, it's not a big deal. All great stuff to hear about, Emily, and it's all in the blog at planetary.org. Thank you very much. Or maybe I should say, shishay.

Shishay. Yes. That's Emily Lakdawalla, Senior Editor for the Planetary Society. We go on now to talking about a mission to the outer reaches of the solar system. New Horizons. We'll talk with Alan Stern and his co-author, David Grinspoon. Before New Horizons could leave on its nearly 10-year journey to Pluto, before it could reveal that world and its companions in all their stunning glory, the mission had to find support and funding,

and the spacecraft had to be built and tested on one of the tightest schedules in the history of space exploration. And then, after traveling across the solar system, a catastrophe was narrowly averted. Those portions of the New Horizons story and much more are in the new book by the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern, and astrobiologist, author, and award-winning science communicator, David Grinspoon. The book is Chasing New Horizons, Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto. Alan and David recently stopped by the Griffith Observatory in the hills above Los Angeles to deliver a public presentation. They sat down with me at the observatory shortly before that talk.

David and Alan, thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Alan, of course, a repeat performance for you. You're one of the most frequent guests on the show. David, it's about time we got you in front of these microphones. repeat performance for you. You're one of the most frequent guests on the show. David, it's about time we got you in front of these microphones. Welcome again. It's a pleasure. Thanks very much. I already told you, I love the book. It's a wonderful chronicle. Even though Alan, as I think I told you in email, the first hundred pages or so made me firmly decide, I never want to propose a planetary science mission.

It's tough, isn't it? It's very selective and you have to really want it. Yeah. We weren't trying to scare anybody off, but we did want to tell people what it's really like because that's kind of an untold story. Yeah. I'm going to come back to that. I first of all have to give credit to the place where we're sitting right now, which is a sacred spot for me. I almost grew up here, here at the Griffith Observatory.

This is probably where I first heard about Pluto because my parents brought me here, they say, before I could walk. When did you get your introduction to the planet? It's in the book here, Alan. Well, you know, when I was a boy, I was very interested in astronomy and space exploration. And everybody reads about the planets if you're interested in that kind of thing. And as David and I say, Pluto was the mystery planet, all the question marks. So that's my first memory of Pluto. And then, of course, the Clyde's Tombaugh story of a living human being at that time had discovered a planet. Then professionally, I was a graduate student looking for a master's

thesis in planetary atmospheres. And my advisor, Harlan Smith, who was the department chairman at the University of Texas, department chairman of astronomy and director of McDonald Observatory, said, there's this young hotshot you should go see. His name is Larry Trafton. He's made all these fantastic discoveries about Titan in the outer solar system. And I'll bet he'll have a problem for you to go work on. And I screwed up my courage to go see this guy. And he took me under his wing. And at the time, he was working on the escape of Pluto's atmosphere. And that became my master's thesis.

David, what was your introduction to Pluto? God, that's a great question. It's really hard to remember. I mean, I can't remember the first time I heard about Pluto, but I certainly remember the early books about the solar system. Remember that time-life series that Carl Sagan wrote in the 60s, The Planets? And I remember also this early National Geographic issue that Alan and I talk about, and we actually talk about it in the book because it was in 1970, a sort of summary of what then was known about the planets and the

missions that had been flown and were, you know, they were hoping to fly in the 70s. And Pluto was in there, as Alan said, is this mystery planet with all the question marks in the chart, where all the other planets had said, you know, this is their temperature, and this is what they're made out of. And Pluto, it was like unknown, unknown, unknown. So it was this misty mystery world. And remember, there were a lot of cool science fiction stories speculating on it because you could say whatever you wanted and not be contradicting anything that was known. Because nothing was known. We didn't even know if Pluto had moons back then.

We didn't know anything except its orbit. You talk in the book about that postage stamp, the first of the postage stamps. Yes. Which also backed this mystery. Yeah, well, you know, it was such an accomplishment. The United States, the early days of the space program, made a commitment to start sending robotic spacecraft to the planets. And we were first to successfully reach Mars and first to Venus even before that. And then Mercury was next and then Jupiter and so forth, all the way to Neptune.

And in the space of a quarter century from 1962 to 1989, all the planets out to Neptune were explored. And Voyager, of course, was the headliner mission of the 80s that first went to Uranus and Neptune. And when Voyager triumphantly finished at Neptune, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps for the exploration of the planets. Nine stamps. Eight of the nine had been explored. And for each planet, they had a nice image depicting what it really looks like from a close-up spacecraft, and then a drawing or an artist's conception of the spacecraft that had done the first exploration. Of course, for Pluto, they didn't know what it looked like, and then no spacecraft had been there.

So the ninth step just had this fuzzy ball, and it said, Pluto, not yet explored. It was an artist's conception because that was all they could do. And that became a bit of a dare to a lot of people, an exploration dare, a little unfinished business. Eight out of nine, we're not going to leave it that way. Of course, the ultimate irony in that is that not only did that help foment people who are in the story of chasing new horizons to go and formulate a mission to Pluto and fight for it. But as we were getting very close to launching, I made a decision as the mission

principal investigator that we would paste that stamp on the spacecraft and fly it in Pluto's face and get it canceled. And we did that. Then at the flyby in July of 2015, when I told that story, and we held up a big stamp three feet on a side right to the crowd a symbol that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab thousands of people I didn't know it but in the audience was the U.S. Postmaster General and she was so galled by that stamp now having been inaccurate that she immediately initiated a Pluto explored stamp which you can now. And the stamp that Alan and his colleagues held up there at the flyby, it was a giant copy of that one that said, Pluto not yet explored, but they crossed out the words not yet

for a makeshift Pluto explored stamp. So that expired stamp in more ways than one, that was just one of the things that you put on the spacecraft, which maybe not a lot of people know about. You also loaded it with a really touching tribute to the gentleman that you just mentioned, Pluto's discoverer. Yeah, that was a really poignant part of the story. I mean, one thing we love, I love, and we enjoyed telling was the intergenerational aspect of this story, that Clyde Tombaugh, it was not very long ago, 1930, he discovered Pluto. A lot of people were still alive from that time, and he lived into the space age.

Clyde was at a lot of the Voyager encounters. A lot of us got to know him. He was part of our community. He didn't quite live to see the exploration of Pluto, but his families involved. His wife, Patsy, was at the launch. His kids were at the flyby. One other thing that is on board New Horizons, and this was not known at the time of the launch by the public and was revealed later, but Alan arranged with Clyde's family for some of his ashes to be on board the New Horizons spacecraft. So a little bit of Clyde went back out to the planet that he

discovered in 1930. And it's something he wanted. When we were first doing Pluto mission studies, we'd see him from time to time, and he had expressed his desire that if you guys ever actually make this happen, I would be honored if you would fly a little bit of my remains, because he said, you know, he was 91 years old or whatever it was, and he said, I'm just not going to make this another 20 years. So please come and ask my family. And we did. And they agreed. And we got that done. And I'm very proud of it. I got the feeling reading the book that this became for you, Alan, a very emotional relationship. And that there was some, there was a sense of completion in having those

photons that Clyde had been the first to realize were a world and then returning a bit of him out to where they came from. You know, when Clyde died in January of 97, this was long before New Horizons. We were working on Pluto mission studies, and the journal Nature asked me to write his obituary for Nature. And I was pretty honored that they would ask of all people me. And what I most thought about were his parents. His life was now complete. And what must his parents have thought of this man that they raised who discovered a planet

and ultimately, although they never knew it, discovered the vast third zone of the solar system. And I titled that obituary after his father's name, Muran. I titled the obituary, Was Muran's Boy? And it was written from the perspective of what he had accomplished and what his parents would have thought of it if they could view it through the lens of the 90s when we knew about the Kuiper Belt, how proud they would be. Nature wouldn't take the title.

They took the article verbatim, but they insisted on calling it Clyde W. Tombaugh with dates 1906 to 1991. 1997, excuse me. But in the little plaque that we put on board the spacecraft, the inscription with his ashes, we mentioned his parents, Muran and Adele. It's very touching. I talk about this where we're sitting now being a sacred place to me. I was in another sacred place exactly one

week ago, the National Air and Space Museum, standing under your spacecraft or the closest thing to it that is still on this planet. It meant even more to me because that by that time, I had finished reading the book. And just looking up at that and thinking that this device, this human-made contraption is headed now for the stars after revealing this system, not just one world, as nothing had ever done before. I'm overwhelmed by that, and I wasn't part of the mission. Both of you were. David, you were connected to the mission as well as working on the book.

Yeah, I had some peripheral involvement for a long time. For one thing, I knew Alan, and a lot of the team members of New Horizons are some of my dearest, oldest friends, people I went to grad school with and have sort of grown up with. So I followed their struggle to get a mission approved and endorsed by the community and then the struggle to actually get it built. And then I was at the launch. And I was involved in some ways.

We talk about this committee, the Solar System Exploration Subcommittee, that at one point in the story is absolutely pivotal in endorsing the mission and getting NASA. And you were on that committee. Yeah, and I served on that committee. So I was at some of those meetings where New Horizons was sort of up against other missions. And then during the encounter, I was working with the team as a liaison between the science team and the media, helping to sort of interpret what was happening in real time. So I had some involvement, but my involvement in this book is mostly as sort of a narrator and a fan and an interpreter.

I'm glad you mentioned the Air and Space Museum because I share your wonder when I go in there. And the room where New Horizons is hanging there, there's also a Voyager replica. Full size. Right next to New Horizons. The contrast is striking because New Horizons compared to Voyager is tiny. And that's part of the story we tell in this book because in order to get it done, they had to find a way to solve the problem of how do you fly a powerful, well-equipped scientific spacecraft that far on a tiny budget compared to Voyager and in a tiny package. And it's the 21st century of the miniaturization and the very clever design solutions. And when you see it there next to Voyager, you realize,

I mean, we talk in the book about the hamster in the houseboat, and Voyager's the houseboat, and New Horizons is the hamster. And the fact that it's small is part of the story of how this clever team came up with this clever solution of how to, you know, really not very large pile of resources to accomplish this incredible journey past Pluto. By the way, an interesting tangent, but the Air and Space Museum is now beginning a seven-year renovation. We never had one. We talked with Ellen Stofan about that, which is why I was there. And so I'll tell your listeners that New Horizons is in the Hall of Planetary Exploration, hanging right next to Voyager.

But when the renovation is complete, it will not be there. If you want to see it compared to Voyager, you have to go soon. They're going to move us out into the main hall. New Horizons will be next to the Hubble. And there will only be three spacecraft out there, and there will be Hubble and New Horizons, and they're going to pick one more. It's a place of honor. I'm really astounded that we're going to be out there. It's an incredible honor for New Horizons and our team.

The voyage continues, but I want to go back to the start because I talked about how, you know, the first hundred pages of the book, you simply document all of the hurdles you had to jump to be able to turn this mission into a reality. It is a daunting, an intimidating story. But, you know, David didn't write it as a documentation. He wrote it as an adventure life of these advances and reversals that we went through, and we could never quite see our way to daylight until the very end, of course, in 2003, when it was finally a settled matter. And he makes it an adventure story. It's a page-turner. Yeah, it really is. It unfolds like a novel because there are these constant ups and downs.

I knew there was a Mars underground. Learning there was a Pluto underground was new and exciting. That's what we called ourselves. We modeled ourselves after Chris McKay and Carol Stoker and the successful Mars underground of graduate students of the early 80s. And we were graduate students and postdocs and young professors at the end of the 80s. And we said, well, those guys made that work. And I think, we think that's a fine name. So we're going to be the Pluto underground.

Yeah. There were, as I said, lots of hurdles. And there were roadblocks put in your way as you were headed toward doing this mission. Because in a sense, you were bucking the system, bucking the established way for planetary missions. No one had ever had a homegrown first mission to a planet. At the time, when Voyager finished, NASA did not intend to go all the way back out to the frontier of the solar system and explore Pluto, just to leave it as unfinished business. And all of the other first missions to all of the other eight had been

done by NASA starting the project and then calling for experiment proposals and instrument team proposals and so forth. Never had one been created as a groundswell within the planetary science community, which is what we intended to do and ultimately what we accomplished. And right up the road here is the place where most of the planetary science missions have been originated and, you know, very successfully for the most part. Absolutely. They weren't exactly helpful to you upstarts. Well, I would disagree with that a little bit. I mean, I know in the story, there's some pretty honest commentary about times when JPL didn't help and more than that.

But also JPL was helpful. And so over the years, you know, the priorities shifted. And when it was to JPL's advantage, JPL was behind it. And when it wasn't to JPL's advantage, understandably, JPL wasn't for it and wanted to do other things. And that's how institutions work. You know, and JPL ended up our competitor since I teamed with the Applied Physics Lab. That whole story is told and how fierce a competition it was and how just like in the real world, there was some brawling going on and some pretty high stakes.

You read the rest. Yeah, I mean, this is certainly not an anti-JPL story or anti-JPL book. In fact, we are in awe of JPL and their accomplishments. Who's not? Who's not? And JPL was involved in New Horizons. Bonnie Barati is one of the co-investigators. They provided the

independent navigation function. They run the deep space network. We couldn't have done it without them. And the setup of this book starts with the wonders of Voyager. And that's a JPL story. And there probably wouldn't be a New Horizons if that inspiration and that expertise hadn't been developed. But at the particular time

when this mission was a possibility, JPL had developed a certain way of doing things, and, you know, they were a pretty big operation, a pretty big bureaucracy, and it was kind of expensive to get a mission done through JPL. And there was this upstart lab, APL, which was the Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland. They had never done an outer solar system mission, but they had a lot of experience doing innovative planetary missions. But they were a newer place.

They were new to the game of planetary exploration, a much smaller, leaner operation. That was perfect for Alan and his team, who wanted to do an innovative project, a smaller-scale project with this smaller organization. And working with APL, they were able to put in a proposal who wanted to do an innovative project, a smaller-scale project with this smaller organization. And working with APL, they were able to put in a proposal to do the exploration of Pluto at a much lower cost than they would have had otherwise. So at that particular time, the APL-JPL competition,

we set up as a dynamic of two different ways of doing things. But as Alan said, JPL also was very integral to the success of the mission because of their expertise in navigation and their deep space network and all these crucial parts. So it's like you can't really do this without JPL. Of course, that was then and this is now and things have moved on and JPL is doing wonderful things. So we certainly don't intend this as JPL making JPL the bad guys, but there was a dynamic at that time when the existence of this other, this new upstart lab, it's part of the underdog story of this mission. It allowed them to do things in a different way. And NASA, you know, NASA has

competitions all the time. JPL competes with Goddard and sometimes JPL wins and sometimes Goddard wins. In this case, JPL competed with APL and APL won. JPL wasn't very happy about that. In this case, JPL competed with APL, and APL won. JPL wasn't very happy about that. And I appreciate the frank telling of this story, because it does give you this insight into how this kind of stuff takes place. And it's a damn shame, isn't it, that, you know, there are so many wonderful proposals that are simply never going to become spacecraft. No, it's absolutely true.

I mean, one of the realities of planetary exploration, as is true of a lot of endeavors, is that there are more good ideas than there are resources to accomplish them. Those of us in the game of planetary exploration are very aware of this because we spend a lot of our time and effort writing proposals for missions, and a lot of them are good ideas that don't happen. It's only the very best ones that rise to the top. So, yes, you know, there are, it's fierce.

The competition is intense. It's often painful, you know, but that's part of the process. You talk in the book about not just difficulties that you ran into, there were technical difficulties as well in trying to put the spacecraft together, but the development and the approval of this mission were so wrapped up in what was happening politically at NASA, successes and failures of other missions at NASA that had a huge effect. And I don't know how many times, Alan, did it look like the mission had been canceled? Well, you know, I often say that if Pluto mission had been a cat,

it would have been dead long ago because cats only get nine chances. And David actually, you know, I think many of your listeners know what the Drake equation is, right? Sure. Calculating the number of habitable, rather intelligent civilizations in the universe. And every time you go through the Drake equation, you get a big number. David wanted to actually do a version of the Drake equation for the probability that a Pluto mission should happen with all these multiplicative factors and show how unlikely it was that we were actually able to explore Pluto. Yeah, we need to do that. We keep saying

on the next plane ride, we're going to do it. And then we're too busy reading our email. But it would be a fun exercise because there are all these gateways it has to go through. But it would be a fun exercise because there are all these gateways it has to go through. Will it rise to the top of the ranking of the decadal surveys we have where if you're not at the top of all the other missions that are competing, then it's not going to happen? And then it gets canceled. Will it get resurrected? Will this team win the competition against this other very formidable team where they were the underdogs? They were the Davids and the other team was the Goliaths.

And in this case, David won. And then will they be able to make the launch in time for the launch window? Once they get approved, it's a breakneck race to, you know, there's no delaying because Jupiter has to be in the right place. So you can launch and fling yourself past Jupiter to get to Pluto. Then there were some crises, you know, that they needed to launch with enough plutonium to power the spacecraft. But the Los Alamos got shut down. After an accident. Because of a security breach. Not our accident.

Just an accident somewhere else in the lab. Yeah. And so then they stopped making plutonium. And nobody knew when they were going to start again. And if they didn't start soon, there wouldn't be enough plutonium to launch New Horizons and work at Pluto. And so, you know, there are all these gateways. So if you add up the probability of surviving each one, I think you would end up with a very low probability of mission success. You did have some guardian angels along the way.

I think of Barbara Mikulski, the congresswoman from Maryland. And others, you know, Dom Kramigis, Jim Green. There are quite a number. I got another one for you. Jim Green, who now, of course, is chief scientist at NASA, because I have to get in some shameless self-promotion.

You guys are very kind to the Planetary Society in the book, and I want to pass along that the boss, Bill Nye, is grateful. The Planetary Society was very kind

to the people trying to make a mission to Pluto happen. So David, my co-author, often refers to me, he likes to bastardize the PI term and say I was the principal instigator of getting a Pluto mission to the launch pad. I will tell you, as the principal instigator, there were many near-death experiences, and every occasion on which I asked Lou Friedman or Bill Nye or anyone in the Planetary Society for help, they were at our shoulder immediately, and they turned it on. And it was a big part of the reason we got to do it was because in addition to the scientific motivation, it was clear the public was fascinated by the idea of going to Pluto. And that would not have been clear had it not been for the Planetary Society. Lou and Bill did an amazing job, but in a way the real heroes were the members of the Planetary

Society and the people out in the public who, when the call came out, they wrote those letters. And literally NASA, a couple of times, crucial times in this story when support was needed, NASA got inundated by tens of thousands of letters from the planetary society, from members, and it made a difference. So you listeners out there, if you ever think that nobody's listening, I mean, there are times when your involvement can save a mission. And in this case, New Horizons would not have happened if people hadn't gotten involved. So Pluto went viral even before we were using that term in the way it's used today. It did.

That's right. Okay. So we could talk endlessly about just getting this mission off the ground, literally. But we don't have time for that. Well, you know, in the book, this 300-page long book, it moves pretty quickly. The whole political story, in fact, the whole history in the political story, is only the first third of the book. Yeah.

I want to jump forward, after many trials and tribulations, to you standing, seeing your spacecraft for the last time before it was locked up in that rocket. Yeah, this was a very auspicious day. It was the day that the nuclear power generator, the RTG, was fueled with plutonium. And it was Friday the 13th of January 2006. As soon as it was fueled and radioactively hot, of course, you don't want people around it unless you've got it shielded. And the door on the nose cone of the rocket, the fairing, had to be put in place. But before they did that, they let a few of us have our pictures taken in front of the fueled New Horizons. And I asked to go last because having worked on it a long time, I knew this

would be the last picture ever taken of the spacecraft. And I wanted to be in it. It meant a lot to me. You said something. What were your last words to New Horizons? Well, this was later. This was six days later. This was during the launch.

And I was going out to the launch pad every night to memorize what that enormous launch vehicle looked like. And I went with several NASA executives the night before we launched, and they went back to the car and left me standing there for a few minutes. I just said, I just want to stand here and just look at it one more time. And I just said a little secular prayer to make us proud. Picture-perfect launch. Time flies by. You get to practice everything you're going to do at Pluto at Jupiter

and do some real science there. Now we're, I hate to be jumping ahead like this. There's so much wonderful stuff like the hibernation period and so on, which you were also pioneers at conducting, putting a spacecraft to sleep essentially to save not just power on the spacecraft, right, but the work of people on Earth. Sure. Yeah. Now it's, what, a few days, a week before the encounter. It's fireworks day, July 4th, 2015. Something goes terribly wrong.

You've got to tell a little bit of this story. Do you want to do it? I'll start. You jump in. We both get excited telling the story, and we tend to jump in on each other. It's how the book begins. Yeah. The book begins with this near-death experience.

Yeah. So the spacecraft had basically traveled flawlessly across the entire solar system. A couple of minor things that happened and had to be dealt with, as always happens in space flight. But pretty much it was picture perfect. And then 10 days before closest approach, which is only three days before the encounter really begins, what they call the core part of the encounter, which is making the crucial scientific observations. So three days to go before that. It's July 4th.

Most of the teams are taking their last vacation really before the intensity of the encounter. So skeleton crew running the spacecraft. Routine communication with the spacecraft, checking in. All of a sudden it goes offline. It's just gone. Dead. Signal's dead. No spacecraft. Alan gets a phone call, and he knows it's probably not good news. Fourth of July. Alan, you can tell from the tone of voice, it's not good.

We've lost contact with the spacecraft. And at first, what goes through everyone's mind is the worst. Because there have been spacecraft that have gone and that's it. You never hear from them again. You know, Mars Observer. Right before it gets to Mars, that's it. It blows up. Never hear from it again.

So disaster can't help but flood your mind. But, you know, the team swung into action remarkably. They fortunately were able to regain contact with the spacecraft. Alan shows up at mission control. People start streaming in. It's Fourth of July, so they're in their, like, flip-flops and bathing suits, you know, which they end up – nobody knew it, but they end up staying there for days and nights. You brought in cots. Which they end up, nobody knew it, but they end up staying there for days and nights. You brought in cots.

If I had known, I'd have flown out east just so I could go to KFC and McDonald's and pick up food for you guys. We could have used the help. So it's like Apollo 13. People eating out of candy machines and sleeping under their desks. But, I mean, the way that team swung into action and quickly they realized, okay, they had communication. So it wasn't the worst case scenario. They found the spacecraft. The spacecraft was alive. But it was not in good shape. It had rebooted on the backup

computer because the main computer had been temporarily overloaded. And when that happened, it wiped out all these files that had been painstakingly loaded for months and months, files that were needed for the flyby that was about to start. All the instructions, because obviously, as everybody who listens to this show knows, you didn't have live control over New Horizons as it was making that encounter. It wasn't even pointing at Earth. And if it had been, how many hours of light travel time? It's such a distance that it takes four and a half hours for a signal to get there. So nine hours round trip. And another four and a half back.

So it takes nine hours just to say, are you okay? So it had to be prepared to do this on its own. And then nine hours later it says, yeah, I'm fine, but I don't have any flyby files. What should I do? And then, okay, well, increase your data rate so we can talk to you at fast enough speed. And that's another nine hours just to get the data rate back up. And then they calculate how many of these nine-hour windows do we have left before it has to start the encounter. And the answer is they have three, basically.

They have months of work to do to recreate these files. And it's just extraordinary. We talk about Alice Bowman, who's the mission operations manager. MOM, that's the acronym. Right. And she's another amazing character who winds through this book. And her team, they were real heroes of this. They did so much work in so little time, and they had to do it perfectly and get this recreated.

They had to write the software, debug it, test it, and reconstruct these files and get it all up on the spacecraft. They couldn't make one mistake in one line of code. They knew that New Horizons was barreling in on Pluto a million miles a day at this point, and they knew that a few days later it was going to fly by Pluto one way or another, maybe not working. And in the end, it turns out, with about three or four hours to spare, they got it back on track and working. And all the files back up there and the spacecraft ended up executing the flyby flawlessly.

Absolutely heroic effort. Another opportunity that you had in the book to talk about your team, which was a really small team compared to, like, what, Voyager? Well, Voyager was close to 500 people and we were 50 belly buttons. Absolutely amazing effort. I mean, it is throughout the book, but this is maybe the ultimate statement of the quality of folks that you had and the dedication. I'm really blown away by that they were able to accomplish this. Real realize that when we started and when we formed the team around the proposal, this was the kind of mission that everyone wants to be on, right? The first mission of the last planet. Any first mission to a new planet, people are going to crawl all over themselves and compete for every job position, for every engineering position, for every flight control position, for science team, all of that.

So we really had the pick of the litter. And we asked people to make a commitment to stay the entire 15 years, not to leave the project for other projects, not to leave their institution for other jobs. And so we formed a very close-knit team. By the time we got to Pluto 15 years later, virtually everyone was still there. A couple of people had found other things to do for one reason or another, but it was really, we were 90-something percent the same people that got started writing a proposal.

And we knew each other very well. We were very practiced. And all the people on the team were just A-listers, the top of the A-list in every position. And so we had this very powerful team, and when we had to swing into action, they did months of work in a matter of days, and they did it in a way that there are literally special sessions at spacecraft operations meetings around the country that talk about lessons learned from how New Horizons pulled it out. Wow. And by the way, we start the book, plunge you right into this crisis. The first thing that happens in the book is Alan gets that phone call. You know, we've lost contact with the spacecraft. And then we kind of take you right into that crisis. And then just before it's resolved, we pull you way back and

go back in time and everything that leads up to beginning with the you know the uh my background and then clyde tombow and pluto was discovered and how the pluto files of pluto underground came to be and then you never see the resolution of it until we're on pluto's doorstep and by that time you've learned this whole story. You've gotten to know the team. You know who these characters are. And you've gotten to know the spacecraft. And you understand a lot about how it works and what the NHOPs, the New Horizons Operation Simulator is,

and all these things that are pivotal in solving that problem. You recognize them now because you've heard the whole story. So then we plunge you back into that scene, but you've been oriented. And then we solve it. And then we take you to Pluto. Can I just say one thing? Please. They ought to make a movie.

They really should be. That actually occurred to me because it does unfold, as I said, like a novel. It's amazing how many people. We were going on this book tour for three weeks. And we're going to different cities, york dc philadelphia detroit uh chicago houston here san francisco etc and at every stop people say to us when's this going to be a movie and what would you someone said to you as a michael crichton novel accepted it wasn't fiction yeah except that's the science works one of the journalists we talked to said this is like

a michael crichton book it's a techno thriller, except this isn't fiction. This happened. And I was like, wow, yeah, that's the kind of story we were trying to tell because that's the kind of story it was. I knew we wouldn't be able to talk much about the science, the results, which, of course, were spectacular. Beyond anybody's expectations, even yours, right, Alan? They were far beyond my expectations, even though I expected a lot. And I expected Pluto to really perform. It was far beyond what I expected.

It was wonderful. One thing I want to say to your listeners is this is not a science book. We intentionally decided we're not going to write about the scientific results very much. We have a little bit at the end where we put it in perspective. There are other books for that purpose. There are great images as well. The book is loaded with images of both scenes during the whole development,

the people that were involved, but also great pictures of Pluto and its satellites and so forth. But we really didn't want to write a science book, even though I'm a scientist and David's a scientist. We wanted to touch on that lightly and really tell the story of the spaceflight. And the team. And the team.

And so the science is a part of the story, but it's a relatively small part. I bet it's 5 or 10 percent of the pages. And I think that was a perfect approach for this book as well. Before we finish, I already said the voyage continues. How far are we from that next target? Well, it's the middle of May, and by the middle of December, we will be on Ultima Thule's doorstep, bearing down on a New Year's Eve and New Year's Day flyby. It'll be actually much closer range, much closer than we went to Pluto, and I can't wait.

Extremely exciting. Guys, I can recommend the book without reservation. And we have a surprise for listeners to this show because back at the office, I'm told, is a box full of books that you guys signed. And we're going to offer the first of those in the weekly space trivia contest, which is coming up with Bruce Betts in just a few minutes. I just want to finish again by saying, great book, an absolute triumph. Alan, where do you go from here? Well, we're going to get the flyby of Ultima Thule just right. And then we're going to go look for other targets and important science to do in the corporate belt with New Horizons. And like most scientists,

I'm involved in other missions like Europa mission and the Lucy asteroid Trojan mission and the Rosetta mission and heavily involved in commercial spaceflight. And I have another book that'll come out next year. We'll talk about that another time. Will you come back yet again? And we'll talk more about the science results. Always, Matt. Anything you like. Thank you, Alan. David, same for you. Where do you go from here, and how was it being able to create or help create the definitive chronicle of this historic mission? Well, I'm going to explore more planets and tell more stories and write more books.

But this was a really unique project for me because this story is the best story of planetary exploration in our time, in the 21st century, and one of the best ever, really. It's extraordinary, and it's one that our generation did. You know, we were children of Voyager. This was our time, and it was so great to see Alan and my other close friends on this mission succeed. And the opportunity to tell the story with Alan and draw out what's in his head and together weave together this narrative with him and these other voices was, to me, it was like just a treasure of an experience. And I hope we've succeeded in making the story as exciting for the reader as it is for us. I think you have, speaking as one happy reader. The book is Chasing New Horizons Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, and we have been talking with its authors,

Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission. With it from the start, a what, for the mission, with it from the start, a what, 30-year effort? 26, but who's counting? 20. Okay. And David Brinspoon, also a member of the mission, noted author and scientist in his own right, who had a role in making sure the mission happened. I'm glad that things have worked out the way they have for New Horizons,

and I'm also looking forward to Ultima Thule this New Year's Eve. The book is published by Picador, and it's available in all usual places. And we'll give away one in just a few moments. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist for the Planetary Society,

who joins me to do this segment every week, and also joined me last Friday out in the Mojave Desert for a test of a planet-backed Zodiac. That was fun. That was indeed fun and successful. Tell people, you know, what was it that we were watching? We were watching a Masten Zodiac rocket that had been fitted with a Honeybee Robotics PlanetVac surface sampler that was sponsored in part by the Planetary Society to develop a reliable way to collect samples on other planetary surfaces. This was testing on a rocket. There'll

be lots more information on our website and an upcoming show from Matt. Yeah, absolutely. Got some great stuff there. And you took some great photos that we'll share too, eventually, when we're ready. For the moment, though, let's talk about what's up. Venus and Jupiter, both super bright in the early evening,

looking awesome. Look over to the west. Soon after sunset, you'll see super bright Venus. And then in the east, you'll see very bright Jupiter. And on the morning of, well, actually the evening or morning of the 27th, roughly, you'll see Jupiter hanging out near the moon. And then also, as I mentioned last time, on the 27 27th and if you don't hit it exactly right you'll still get something like this there's a nice line of the bright star Procyon and then Venus and then the bright star Capella and Venus will continue to move then towards Gemini or Gemini move towards

Venus or the earth move depending on how you like to think about these things. All right, I'll be looking up. On to this week in space history. Hard to believe it. It was 10 years ago that Phoenix landed successfully on Mars. Oh, man. And it's still, well, not encased in ice all the time up there. Just, what, half the year? Only half the year.

It went great. And, in fact, let's talk a little bit about random space fact. Phoenix was the highest latitude successful Mars lander at about 68 degrees north. The failed Mars polar lander crashed around 76 degrees south. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, who was the only person to discover a planet or moons in the 18th century? It just still amazes me that there was only one person in that entire 100-year block to discover a planet or moons. And how'd we do? A terrific response to this one.

You fired their imaginations, I think. Out of all of the entries that we got, random.org selected Taylor Duffin, a first-time winner if he's got this right. Knoxville, Tennessee is where he hails from. And indeed, he said, William Herschel was that singularly successful astronomer in the 18th century, though he wasn't actually singular. We'll come back to that in a moment. Was it Herschel? It was indeed. Tell me more. Oh, I was going to ask you the same question. All right. Well, he discovered Uranus and also, well, although he wanted to name it after King George,

but he discovered it and also the moons Oberon and Titania of Uranus, as well as Enceladus and Mimas of Saturn. And even more, according to listener Norman Kassoon, over 800 double stars and 2,500 nebulae. And here's one I did not realize. He was the first astronomer to correctly describe the spiral structure of our Milky Way galaxy. Wow. I did not realize that. Brian Mangold in Maricopa, Arizona. Since we're talking about that planet that has so many jokes made about it, a moon pertaining to Uranus, he says, is Uranian, not urinal, which seems fortunate, he says.

I would agree with that. It's not something that ever occurred to me. I don't know why that didn't occur to me as a fifth grader when we were all having fun with Uranus. In connection with that, Torsten Zimmer in Germany, he also talked about Herschel wasn't responsible for the joke-inspiring name. As you said, he wanted to name it after King George. No one would laugh at that, right? No, of course not. Finally, Dave Fairchild, the poet laureate of Planetary Radio. In the 18th century,

astronomers were blue. They couldn't find a spheroid to affix a label to, then William Herschel charted five. He'd probably found less without his sister Caroline to help him chart success. And that was what I meant by not being singular. Caroline Herschel, quite a terrific astronomer in her own right, was key to a lot of the work that her brother was able to accomplish long ago in England. Indeed. Taylor Duffin, congratulations. You've won yourself a coveted Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account. That great service provided by iTelescope, a worldwide network of telescopes operated on a nonprofit basis. And you'll be able to use that yourself, or you can donate it to a school or

some other nonprofit organization. By the way, that Planetary Radio t-shirt, you can find it in the Planetary Society store at chopshopstore.com. And I'm sure you want to admire the model of the shirt there. It's me. Anyway, we, as I have told people at the end of our conversation with Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, we have a really great prize to go with the itelescope.net account next time, the contest you're about to tell us about. And it is a signed copy of Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's terrific chronicle of the New Horizons mission, chasing New Horizons inside the epic first mission to Pluto. So go ahead, tell people what they're going to have to answer to have a chance to win this. This week, it's personal. What hardware did the Planetary Society provide to the Phoenix Mars mission?

What hardware did the Planetary Society provide to the Phoenix Mars Mission? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. If random.org selects you and you get this one right, it shouldn't be too hard to find. Chasing New Horizons, the signed edition, signed copy will be yours. You need to get that entry to us, though, by May 30th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about whether there's a different letter shirt besides T-shirt. Thank you, and good night.

Why shirt? Why not? It's the best I can do. He's Bruce Betts. He does much better as chief scientist of the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. just any music, it's part of a collaboration led by China Blue that has created Cassini's Dreams, an eerily

beautiful audio tribute inspired by the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and that magnificent world itself. This track is grand numeration. It suggests the countless ring particles circling the planet like birds flocking in a giant cloud

of wings. You can learn more about Cassini's dreams at ChinaBlueArt.com. Sales benefit the non-profit Engine Institute. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members who go where no one has gone before. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra. Thank you.