Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - New Horizons Flyby: Join the Celebration!

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

Join us at the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland for the New Horizons encounter with the most distant object ever visited. You’ll meet mission leaders, friends and even a rock and roll star as we dive deep into this triumph of exploration.  Then Bruce Betts helps us prepare for the total lunar eclipse. Learn more at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0109-2019-new-horizons-ultima-apl.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Horizons encounters Ultima Thule this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome and Happy New Year once again. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. You already know that the New Horizons spacecraft successfully flew by that faraway object known officially as 2014 MU69. And you may know that I was at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab to cover this most distant ever encounter for humanity. I'm going to use this week's episode to take you behind the scenes. We'll meet many of the leaders of this magnificently successful mission,

along with some of the great people who gathered at APL for what we all hoped would be a celebration. You'll hear from author and space historian Andy Chaikin, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, astrophysicist, member of the New Horizons team, and guitarist for Queen Brian May, along with many others. We'll close the show as we always do by visiting with Bruce Betts for What's Up. My red-eye flight from California got me to Baltimore

on the morning of December 29th. I had just enough time to reach the Applied Physics Lab to join a tour. There were two and a half days to go before New Horizons would make its closest approach to 2014 MU69. By the way, absolutely no one at APL referred to it by that name. It was and is Ultima Thule to the mission team and friends. There would be a huge media presence by New Year's Eve, but on Saturday

morning, there were only a few of us who were brought to the Mission Operations Center, the control room for New Horizons. Alice Bowman of APL greeted us there. Alice has served as the New Horizons Mission Operations Manager, or MOM, for many years. It was a busy moment with the spacecraft in the midst of communication with the Deep Space Network, but Alice stepped out to talk with us. Today is the last optical navigation measurement that's coming in that will be used in that solution. So once you get through today, can you sit back and relax? No. There's another, you know, set of worries that we have after today. Still just a point of light? Yes, yes. I think we're almost, I think we're a pixel, Yes, yes. I think we're almost, I think we're at pixel, maybe.

The health of the spacecraft is great. We still have all of our redundant systems that are operational. Helene Winters was also on hand that morning. Helene took over the job of New Horizons project manager almost three years ago. Big moment here. And this is a very special moment for those of us who got here early and are able to join you here at the Mission Operations Center. Yes, it's an exciting time. We'll fly by Ultima Thule.

It's just one of the most primitive objects. And we'll have a look at it very shortly. New Year's morning, 1233. We just heard Alice Bowen telling us everything's nominal, which is a very good thing. Yes, the spacecraft, the subsystems, the payload, everything is operating nominally. When the big moment comes, it's really what we'll be going through here is really a simulation on a timeline because you won't be talking to the spacecraft, right? Right. When we make observations, we're not able to downlink the data at the same time because we have to turn the spacecraft.

We'll make the observations and then turn the spacecraft to downlink the data. On July 14th of 2015, we did the close flyby of Pluto. So it's been a while, but we have most of the same team. And we're using a lot of the same processes that we did for our flyby of Pluto, a lot of the lessons learned we've implemented. And no surprises like you had just days before the Pluto encounter? No, certainly, and we did make adjustments to ensure that that doesn't happen again on this flyby. Yeah, you don't want that kind of excitement. Exactly. Can't wait for the encounter. Yeah, you don't want that kind of excitement.

Exactly. Can't wait for the encounter. We're very excited. Thank you. Thank you. From the Mission Operations Center, we were bused to a big room full of boisterous men and women. This was the New Horizons science team, but it sounded more like a middle school lunchroom, with scientists in a score of disciplines getting reacquainted and excitedly sharing data.

The science team is led by project scientist Hal Weaver, a past guest on Planetary Radio. Like right now, we're in the middle of it. We're in the densest portion of the Kuiper Belt. We actually fly relatively close to a bunch of small Kuiper Belt objects. And we get unique geometries from the spacecraft. You know, we get angles that you can't get from the Earth. And so that can tell us something about the reflectivity of the surface. But we can also search for potential moons around those objects that you can't do from anywhere else. You know, so we're learning something about the relatively small objects in the Kuiper Belt, which are by far the most numerous, that we can't get any other way.

the Kuiper Belt, which are by far the most numerous, that we can't get any other way. Would the most surprising thing about Ultima 2 leak be not being surprised by what you find? I think it's hard not to be surprised because none of us have a clue as to what we're going to see, really. I mean, we look at the other small bodies of the solar system that we've observed so far, the cometary nuclei. For example, that's what I'm going to be focusing on. My initial look at the results is to compare the surface of Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko to what we see on Ultima Thule. Now, the comets that we see, the small cometary nuclei, they've made many passages through the inner solar system and have been heated up and have shown a lot of activity

that presumably are responsible for a lot of activity that presumably are responsible for a lot of the features you see on their surfaces. So I don't expect Ultima Thule to really look like them, but we've identified different geological regions on the nucleus of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and maybe some of them can be replicated on Ultima Thule. But also the small moons of the giant planets, the icy moons, are there any commonalities? The fact that you have some of these, the small moons of the giant planets,

it's a very different environment than what Ultima Thule is in. You know, you don't have the tidal interactions with the giant planet that can stir up the interior and cause things to happen. You don't have the particles being generated that can now impact the surfaces on those objects that you have. And they're not these giant magnetospheres either. Around the giant planets you have these giant

magnetospheres. So for these reasons, the environment is being so different, it's hard to imagine what Ultima 2 is going to look like. You all expected to be surprised by Pluto. You told people we'd be surprised, but it was far more surprising than anybody expected. Yeah, that's true. I mean, Pluto itself, in this particular case, we just know so little about the body,

and its environment is so different than anything else that we've ever observed that most of us are, you know, we'll be surprised because, I mean, it's not, I expect to see some commonality with things that we've seen before, but who knows. With our tour concluded, we were brought back to the complex that would be our home throughout the flyby and beyond. One enthusiastic young reporter caught my eye. Accompanied by her parents, she had been taking copious notes during the tour. Hi, my name is Kira Walsh. I'm 12, and I'm right now reporting for Newsomatic.

I suspect that you're going to be the youngest journalist covering this flyby of New Horizons. I think I might be. I'm not quite sure. What have you been up to today? I mean, what have you found most interesting? I'm not really sure. There have you been up to today? I mean, what have you found most interesting? I'm not really sure. There's a lot of interesting points, but the thing I find most interesting is that the light doesn't really change. The light curve, right. The light curve, that's the one, yeah. Yeah, which is a big mystery.

I mean, that's something we talked to Alan Stern on our show about just a couple of weeks ago, and it's one that the scientists can't figure out yet. Yeah, I don't really know. I've heard different opinions from all over. It could be spherical. It could be one light, one dark. It could be a dust cloud, but no one's really sure. Yeah.

You've obviously been paying pretty good attention. How many pages of notes do you have there? You've been taking lots of notes. Five. That's pretty good for one morning. Was it fun to see people who are that much older than you getting that excited about something? Yeah, kind of. You see these people actually getting excited and it's kind of fun. I look forward to seeing your story. Thank you so much.

Thank you. This was my first time at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. It was a long overdue visit. JHU is justly proud of the enormous success it has enjoyed in space exploration since very nearly the beginning of the space age. It is the home of the Parker Solar Probe, of the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, the upcoming Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART mission, of the proposed Dragonfly mission that may send a nuclear-powered drone to Saturn's moon Titan,

and of the New Horizons mission, of course. So I'm Mike Krishkiewicz. I head the space exploration sector here at APL. Even in just those last five years that you've been at APL, you've seen some pretty big successes come out of this place. Oh, it's been marvelously exciting. I mean, it's really, really hard to match something like the Pluto flyby, just the number of people that were involved in that, the knowing that you were, you know, we had just enough information about Pluto before that to be intrigued that this was going to be perhaps more complicated than anybody imagined. And then what you saw in that evening and in the morning and the days after just blew our socks off.

Just so, so exciting. Such a dynamic world. So diverse in everything that's going on there. You couldn't have had a better setup for the scientists. A million questions that are going to take a career to answer. And a heck of an engineering achievement as well. I don't know if you've read Alan's book, Alan and David Grinspoon's book, Chasing New Horizons, but a lot of the book is devoted to getting this mission literally off the ground. And it, in part, came down to a competition between this facility and those other guys who do such a great

job on the West Coast. JPL, APL. We call them the other PL. They call us the other PL. And I would say JPL East, but I'm guessing you might bristle at that event. Oh, we'd rather call them APL West. He painted a pretty good picture of APL. He made it really clear that he was happy to be working with you guys. Nothing against JPL, which has a tremendous record of success, as you know. But about what APL brings to missions like this, can you talk about that? I think the secret sauce is that we are actually smaller. And so that gives us an ability to talk, to communicate, to make decisions in a way that

are very hard to do with a bigger mission. It's a lack of fear in asking the hard question. It's a boldness to go grab and try to do something that's really hard and some courage to know that, hey, we've done this before. Other folks that are like this have done this before, and let's go try this and see if we can pull it off. With New Horizons, there were many, many people that bet that that team would not have succeeded, especially that they would not have succeeded in time to get the Jupiter flyby and to take that five years or thereabouts off of that mission. And they just knuckled down and tried to find a way to go make that happen. A team like this, they get committed to an idea.

And when you have something as marvelous as the first flyby of the ninth planet, the ninth classical planet, and in everybody's mind it was still that, and you get to do another first in the solar system, that's galvanizing for folks. And I've talked to folks, and I think some of them are quoted in the book, that said when they first heard about this, they said, oh, my goodness, what have we been signed up to go do? And then they said, no, we're going to go figure out a way to go make this happen. And that's kind of the beginning of any of these enterprises is people say, man, we've got to go do this.

And here we are even further out approaching Ultima Thule. Yeah, and it's not the end, right? It may be called Ultima, but we're hoping that there's one or more things still out there. So, you know, we'll be spending a little bit of that precious fuel to do the surveys with our cameras, keep looking and see if there's something close enough to our flight path to be able to divert just a little bit and get another flyby in. There are millions of Kuiper belt objects out in the Oort cloud and yes we believe we have one that's probably unchanged since the formation of the solar system, but you got a sample of one. It would be

really nice to get a sample of two or a sample of three. It always takes a great team to make these things happen, but there's always a leader of that team. In this case, Alan Stern. He used to call him the busiest man in space exploration. Can you talk about the role that he's played as principal investigator? Alan was really the driving force of this from day one. There had been some studies before the actual formal competition that said,

you know, maybe there was a chance to do this in a different way than we thought about and not be multiple billions of dollars and things like that. But Alan was the driving force behind that, saying, you know, we've got to go do this. This is important science. It's important for carrying mankind's banner, humankind's banner out into the outer solar system. And so he was the driving force from day one. And a lot of what happens within a team is when they get a dynamic leader like that, that lays out that compelling vision, they buy in and say, I want to be part of this. I've got to be part of this. I can make this

happen and I will make this happen. I headed to my hotel for some much-needed sleep. The next day was Sunday, December 30th. The media crowd at APL was quite a bit larger, and other guests were beginning to arrive. Andrew Chaykin is an old friend. You may know him as the best-selling author of A Man on the Moon, the book that became the Tom Hanks miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and other work that he's joined us in the past to talk about. He's working on a new book about the sociological aspects of success and failure in space exploration. Andy Chaikin, not a surprise to find you here, but you have even more going on than I was aware of. Are you here more as a journalist or what?

No, I'm actually here as a team member. I was at the Pluto encounter as an embedded journalist in the geology, geophysics, and imaging team. And then I became a full-time team member. And so I'm sort of the team historian. And I'm here as I was last time on the inside, which is an incredible place to be to see this adventure unfold. Just amazing. By the way, I want to say that the New Horizons mission is one of the best examples that I can point to of success culture that was created, not only here at APL, the Applied Physics Lab, but also within the mission teams by Alan Stern, the principal investigator.

One of the things he did was to set up the science teams so that there would not be an impetus to hoard data and— To get territorial. To get territorial, exactly, which has happened on other robotic space missions. He saw that. He knew that was a threat to success. So he took the initiative to create a culture within the project that would avoid that. And everywhere you look in New Horizons, you see examples of this success culture. And it is absolutely astonishing the level of ingenuity, the level of skill and persistence.

The people working on this mission have been together since the 1990s, many of them, striving to explore Pluto and even beyond. And by God, here we are doing it. And the accuracy that they're getting in their trajectory to this small body, which is so faint, it had to be discovered with Hubble. It's just mind-blowing. It's one of the things that makes me feel so blessed for the life journey that I've had, and so many of us feel the same way. Much of Sunday was devoted to media encounters with leaders of the New Horizons mission. They included Principal Investigator Alan Stern. New Horizons has been rock solid since the day we launched it. Really amazing. Next month we'll be 13 years in flight.

Everything on the spacecraft is working. We do trending meetings once a year and look at all the engineering data from both the scientific instruments and the subsystems. Our chief engineer, Chris, is right there. He'll tell you that those are pretty boring meetings, in a good way, because the spacecraft really isn't aging, except in the ways that you know it should, like the RTG produces less power,

but it falls right along the half-life curve that's expected. Spacecraft's completely rock solid, and for most of these 13 years, we're not in contact with the spacecraft. Either it's hibernating or it's between DSN shifts or whatever, so the kind of operation that's taking place the next couple days from that standpoint is the same as normal operations.

The difference is the spacecraft is a lot busier than it normally is. And for a short period of time, tomorrow night around midnight, it's going to be closer to Ultima Thule than it's been to anything it's ever been to. For a period of about half an hour or maybe a little less, it's going to be closer's ever been to. For a period of about half an hour, or maybe a little less, it's going to be closer than it got to Pluto. It's going to get three times closer and then recede again. So the last time it was this close to anything was on launch day

when it was close to the Earth, briefly. And your second question, Matt? It was really just that you're going to be out of touch when this happens. You'd be simulating it, basically. Because you have this faith in not just the spacecraft, but your team. Right. There's also some physics that keeps us out of touch. The speed of light is finite.

And so because we're traveling very, very far away, 44 astronomical units, there's a six-hour one-way light travel time delay between us and the spacecraft that enforces us to be out of touch all the time. Even when we want to be in touch, it takes six hours to send a message up, and it takes six hours to get confirmation back. It's 12 hours. The Kuiper Belt is just a scientific wonderland. It is the location where we have the best preserved samples

from the formation era of our solar system. We're 44 astronomical units away from the sun, and as I said, that's a very large distance. As a result, the sun is pretty faint out there, about 2,000 times fainter than it is at high noon here on Earth. So because the sunlight's so feeble, it can't warm things. In fact, the temperatures out there are very close to absolute zero, which is wonderful for preserving information. That combined with the fact that Ultima is so small that it can't have a powerful geologic engine like Pluto does or larger planets.

Those two factors conspire to tell us to expect that this is the best preserved sample of the origin era of the planets that anyone has ever visited. You know, all I ever remember wanting to do was grow up and be a part of space exploration. I was a pretty boring kid. I didn't go through all those phases of wanting to be a policeman and a fireman and all these other things. Exploration of space was just getting started when I was a kid and it was all around us in the news and frankly all my friends when I was little wanted to grow up and be astronauts or a part of space exploration. A lot of them eventually found other things that they ended up doing. I'm somewhere between in the groove and stuck in a rut. And I got to live my dream

in being involved in space exploration. From a personal standpoint Pluto was a little bit of a dare. It was left undone by the Grand Tour, the Voyager project. And because I worked on it scientifically, I really thought, how could we not, as a nation that had explored the whole rest of the solar system, how could we leave this one place unexplored? Particularly when it's a superlative. In so many ways, it's the farthest, right? And it

was the last found. And in scientific terms, it was a whole, represented a whole new class of object. So there was a lot of passion in me to want to do this, but the same was true of all the members of the Pluto underground. If it hadn't been for that group sticking with it, cancellation after cancellation after cancellation, and getting back up off the floor each time, you wouldn't be here today. And those people really deserve amazing credit, because in the end, we made history. Monday, December 31st. This was the big day, the day New Horizons would zoom past Ultima Thule. Well, strictly speaking, that event would happen 33 minutes into the new year on the east coast of the U.S. NASA TV had received special dispensation from the agency's administrator. In

spite of the government shutdown, Jim Bridenstine had come up with funds to cover production of live webcasts from APL. But there was essentially no funding for NASA officials to attend the encounter. That didn't stop the man who, until recently, headed the agency's planetary science division. Jim Green, private citizen. Well, I'm a planetary scientist. I'm here for the excitement. I was delighted to be invited. You know, it's one of those things, wild horses couldn't drag me away, but rather historic making event, which we're all very proud of. This is a fabulous team. You know, they worked all so hard making this happen. What they have to pull off to be able to fly by something so fast

and really not even know where it's at, and all the techniques that they've developed to be able to refine that, it's just really been remarkable, absolutely remarkable. You don't need to comment on this, but I think it's a damn shame that the NASA chief scientist has to be here on his own dime, even though you wouldn't have missed it. Well, it doesn't matter to me whether I'm being paid or not. It's the love of the field. It's the love of what we do.

I, as a scientist, have had many opportunities in my lifetime to see something and discover something no one else has, and that's an aha moment. It's a rush. It's an adrenaline rush. It's, you know, my drug of choice is scientific discovery, so to speak. And to be able to share it with everyone, you know, my neighbors, my friends, people that have been invited here, people I haven't seen in a while that have come from the West Coast and flown in, they're here too on their own. It's wonderful to be part of the crowd sometimes too. Were you here, what, three and a half years ago for the Pluto encounter?

Yeah, of course I was. You know, I could show you where I lived, around the corner. This is one of those gifts from NASA and the team that put together this spacecraft that just keeps on giving. Pluto, now this body, maybe something beyond this, from a relatively inexpensive mission. Yeah, that's right. It's highly capable. I mean, the spacecraft is just, when you think of the computer technology, it's orders of magnitude more capable than the Voyagers are.

And the next wave of stuff that we launch is going to be like that. We're working up to the HAL 9000 series because, indeed, that's what we need. We need those higher capable systems and abilities to be able to make observations, to be able to interpret those, to be able to do things that we can't do ourselves personally sitting on the spacecraft. We have to let our computers do it. Let's try to design one that doesn't become a paranoid schizophrenic.

Oh, I have a theory about that. I don't think it malfunctioned. Oh, you think it made a good logical decision? Yeah, well, you have to think about what's happening. And the New Horizons is a perfect example. What are we doing? We're launching more and more capable systems out into space. Would extraterrestrials do the same?

Did you ever see an alien in the movie? No, you saw its remnants. You saw what it launched and put there to signal, you know, there's an intelligent being. There's intelligence at the other end. Jim, have a great evening. Have fun and happy new year. Happy new year to you too. One friend of the mission stood out partly because of his long, curly white hair. We recently talked with Brian May's co-author, David Eicher, about their stunner of a book called Mission Moon 3D. If you heard that interview, you know that Brian May is a huge fan of stereoscopic imagery.

Actually, as owner of the London Stereoscopic Company, he's more than a fan. Brian also holds a PhD in astrophysics. Oh, and one or two of you may have heard of his band, a group known as Queen. He joined a small group of media reps, including me, to talk about his years-long involvement with New Horizons and the anthem he had just recorded in honor of the mission. Occasional rock star, yeah, okay. I'm here as part of this mission. I'm not here as a tourist. I'm not here as a celebrity.

I'm here to work, and I love it, and I've been involved with Alan and his team since a little before 2015 when the Jupiter flyby happened. So I'm here to answer your questions if you like. Okay, I should mention that I made some music. Alan called me about five months ago and said, can I call you on something? So I thought it's got to be something important. He's calling me to see if he can call me.

And he said, can you make some music for the Ultima Tool flyby? And I thought, ah, this is probably going to be hard because I can't think of anything that rhymes with Ultima Thule at this moment. So I had this doubt in my mind. But then I went away and the thing started to buzz around in my head and I could hear some music of some kind. I could hear some music of an object plummeting through space faster than anything's ever been launched away from this earth. And I got kind of inspired. through space faster than anything's ever been launched away from this earth and I got kind of inspired but I didn't really have the lyric but gradually it dawned on me that this mission is about human curiosity it's about the need of mankind to go out there and explore and discover

what makes the universe tick and this has been going on since the dawn of time so in a sense my song my track my anthem became about the human spirit um endeavoring to discover the universe if anybody lives at the intersection of art and science it's you uh thank you i just wonder what are your feelings about being in both of those worlds the way that you are? I could have paid you to ask that question. Thank you. You're right. This is where I like to be. And I think really my spirit is kind of anchored in Victorian times because in Victorian times there wasn't the distinction

between art and science. Victoria's wonderful husband came to England, the German guy, Prince Albert, and he put on an exhibition which was the works of all nations. And it was all of the best art and all of the best science in our terms, but there was no distinction. So to me, I'm still in that place, and I see the best science as very innovative and even instinctive, and I see the best music as analytical to some extent even if it's

after the event but to me it's all very much a similar process in your head now I've been reading books lately about the two hemispheres of your brain which I thought was a myth but turns out it's not and it's not like one is art and one is science not at all both halves of your brain appear to be engaged in the same things but but they're just engaged in different ways. So I love to do that. I love to feel this kind of exercising of the brain happening when you're going full pelt on something which is scientific endeavor, but it's an artistic thing and you're bringing out the art in it. So this project made music in my head and that's what you're hearing. Thanks. It was, after all, New Year's Eve. There must have been a thousand or so mission team members, friends and family and members of the

media gathered at APL to ring in 2019, followed moments later by the premiere of that tune by Two, one, happy new year! Happy new year! Welcome 2019. Now, countdown to the next one. Brian, let's just get to what you've worked on, what inspired by New Horizons. It's my privilege and my pleasure to introduce to you right now the global, the world premiere of this new theme for New Horizons. Thank you. The revelations of New Horizons may help us to understand better how our solar system was formed.

New Horizons To explore New Horizons No one's ever seen before Copyright considerations will keep me from playing the entire tune for you, but you can hear it and see the music video on YouTube as Brian May's New Horizons. We've got the link on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. As the party continued around us,

I stopped to talk with Heidi Hamel. Heidi is a planetary astronomer who serves as Executive Vice President of Aura, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. Aura has responsibility for many of our best telescopes, including the Hubble. Full disclosure, Heidi is also on the Planetary Society's Board of Directors. Happy New Year, Heidi. Happy New Year. And it's almost an anti-climax compared to what is about to happen here in, I don't know, something like 10-15 minutes. Yeah, 10 minutes from now we're going to celebrate the actual flyby event itself.

So I tweeted earlier today that this place is crawling with science stars. You're here as part of that. Well, thank you, yeah. There's a lot of people here who have been working in planetary science for a very long time. Movers and shakers. Okay, so I know you're a big fan of the outer solar system. I mostly think of you as being thinking of things that aren't quite this far out, like Uranus and Neptune, the ice giants. But does this fit into that? Hey, these are worlds in their own right, and every world deserves to be celebrated and explored. The Kuiper Belt is a really unique part of our solar system,

and especially this kind of Kuiper Belt object, it's a cold, classical object. We think it's a primitive, primordial relic of the early solar system. So it's really very special to us to be able to examine one close up. How do you feel about the thinking that we are, somebody said you don't realize you're in a golden age until after it's gone. But you know at the Society we are saying all the time, we are in the golden age of planetary science. Do you agree?

We have been in a golden age of planetary science and all of us who grew up in the era of exploration of the Voyagers and Galileo and Cassini and the Mars missions and all the other wonderful exploration, including New Horizons. We know it's been a golden era and we've been very privileged to have been able to play a part in that. But it doesn't come easy. What's it going to take to keep this going? That's a tough question. You know, it takes a lot of perseverance. It takes vision. And it takes the ability to think long term. Some of the things we've been hearing about up here, as we reminisce about how we got from Pluto to here, is that it takes decades. It takes decades. And it takes the ability to never take no for an answer and to push and push and push

because you know what we're doing is the right thing. We know that exploring is good for our psyches. So it's not over. We're going to keep on exploring. I know that. I know it in my heart. Just one more. I mean,. I know it in my heart. Just one more. I mean, you've got a fantastic team behind this mission,

as you have terrific teams behind every mission. But how important is the person at the top, in this case, the P.I. Alan Stern? The leader of a mission is always critical to the success of the mission. Alan has been an inspirational leader for the New Horizons mission and for Pluto exploration and outer solar system exploration for a very long time. And I really applaud his ability to bring together a diverse group of people and inspire them to do their very best. That's how we get great missions like New Horizons. So kudos to Alan. Are you excited about seeing those pixels on screen tomorrow? I'm totally excited about it. I can't wait. It's going to be awesome.

And here we go. Thank you, Heidi. You're welcome. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Now we were just moments from the Ultima Thule encounter. But here's the thing. As you've heard, the spacecraft was way too busy examining this most distant ever object to communicate with Earth. Besides, the light travel time was about six hours. But we couldn't let the moment pass without a celebration that was even bigger than the New Year's countdown.

Here's Alan Stern. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Go New Horizons! Go New Horizons! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!

New Horizons is on departure. Go USA! Go NASA! Go New Horizons! Tired but exhilarated, most of us headed back to homes and hotels, but not for long. It was only a few hours later on New Year's morning that we were once again at APL, this time to receive the first actual signal from New Horizons that would tell us all had gone well during the encounter. Mom, this is CDH on Pluto 1. Go ahead, CNDH.

CNDH is nominal. Our SSR pointers are right where we predicted. I got it. Copy that. CDH is green and we have a good data report of Ultima Thule science. Mom this is autonomy. Go ahead autonomy. Autonomy is nominal. Copy, autonomy is nominal. System engineer to mom, status is green.

Copy that, green. And that's overall spacecraft. Yes. We have a healthy spacecraft. We've just accomplished the most distant flyby. We are ready for Ultima Thule science transmission at 200 UTC today. Science to help us understand the origins of our solar system. That's it.

Have you seen this before? Yep. There was time after that event to talk with a few more people in the auditorium, including Texas Congressman John Culberson. The Houston Republican was enjoying the last few hours of his tenure in Congress. He was defeated in November, but not before making a name for himself as a leader in support of planetary exploration and science. Congressman, I just interrupted you being thanked by a bunch of scientists, New Horizons

scientists and others, for the leadership that you provided, have provided as a congressman for planetary science, the passion that you brought to this. You made a difference to a lot of people in this room. It's been my joy to chair the committee that funds NASA. I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, and if I couldn't be an astronaut, I wanted to be in a position where I could make a difference and lift NASA up above and beyond the glory days of Apollo, and I believe I've done that in the short time I've been able to serve

as chairman of the subcommittee that funds NASA. So we have heard a parade of wonders, a parade of human accomplishment already this evening. I didn't know how they were going to carry us through so many hours, but it really has been kind of thrilling, don't you think? It's extraordinary to have a journey through the archaeological history of the solar system, to see the veil lifted from the secrets of the universe, the secrets of creation, the origins of our solar system,

the wonder of these new worlds that are even more wonderful and bizarre than anyone could have imagined before we got there and were able to see them with our own eyes. And that, to me, is one of the greatest joys of the work that NASA does, is the joy of discovery, learning what's over the next hill. Where do we come from? What's out there? That's my joy in helping make these dreams of the future come true. And your influence is going to live on for years. We were just talking with some of those scientists about what's ahead for what we now call

the Ocean Worlds. Yes, I created the Ocean Worlds program and funded it at a level that will enable the new frontiers and discovery-class scientists to launch their missions and to launch a number of flagship-class missions to orbit Europa, to land on Europa. The Europa orbiter and landers are the only missions it is illegal for NASA not to fly. I made sure of that and made sure there's enough money there to go to Europa, orbit, land on the surface, and taste the ice. That's the only way we will know if there is life in that ocean is to land on the surface, and I made sure that will happen because that will electrify the world, electrify the American public, and lift support for NASA to the level it needs

to really achieve everything that is possible. It's going to take a massive infusion of money, achieve everything that is possible. It's going to take a massive infusion of money, and I recognize there needs to be a civilization-level discovery to electrify the American public, to lift NASA funding to that level, and I'm convinced that will be the discovery of primitive life in another world, and the scientific community tells me that is most likely in the oceans of Europa. Thanks again, Congressman. Thank you very much. Mark Bowie has a special distinction on the New Horizons team. The astronomer works out of the Southwest Research Institute that Alan Stern and many other team members are part of.

Mark, moments ago, we celebrated New Horizons passing the object that you had the honor of discovering. That's an amazing feeling. I've been watching this countdown timer on my computer screen for four and a half years. And it hit zero today, which is a little sad because now we're not looking forward to flying by anymore. This has already happened. Onboard the spacecraft, all the pictures are now sitting there waiting to make it beam back to the Earth, and then the real fun begins.

That starts tomorrow, and it's going to take 20 months to get all of these treasures back. Really looking forward to tomorrow morning when we get the first signal back from the spacecraft that said, it's all good. when we get the first signal back from the spacecraft that said, it's all good. Also in the audience was SWRI's John Spencer, Deputy Project Scientist for New Horizons. Congratulations, John. It's got to feel pretty great. This feels awesome. I wasn't too worried about us running into any kind of debris because we'd searched the area pretty thoroughly, but there's always the possibility that something will happen with the spacecraft

and it'll have a computer reset or something and we'd lose data. So when I heard that the data recorders were at the exact right location, that they'd taken the exact right amount of data, that was the moment when I said, yes, we've got this. But this afternoon, we start getting the data taken after the encounter. We should have on the ground this afternoon an image that's 100 pixels across, which will completely blow away what we've had up to now. And that's still kind of a small image, but for an object of a completely different kind that you've never seen any images of before,

it's going to be amazing. As Alan Stern has said many times, we knew less about this object than any place else we've ever been in the solar system. It's true. Even on approach, we learned hardly anything. We didn't even know its rotation rate. We had only a vaguest idea of its color. We knew its orbit very well and its size, and that was about it.

So, yes, there's going to be so much to learn because we're starting from zero. How did it feel to be here in this crowded auditorium with all these fans of this mission that you and others have worked on for so long? Well, it's wonderful because we're in our own little world with our telecons of 20 people and we don't get to connect with the outside world in all the nitty-gritty planning that we're doing. And then suddenly to be surrounded by people who are really keen on what we're doing, have our friends come and be really enthusiastic about it. It's just fabulous. It's been really quite a party. I wouldn't have wanted to spend years anywhere else. Thank you, John, and congrats again. Thank you. A happy new year to you. I found this small group of people wearing blue shirts

unlike anything else that's in this auditorium at APL. So I had to find out what the shirts were, and I got more than I thought I would when I heard that this is sort of a support group. I mean, what is your relationship to the mission? Alice Bowman is my sister. My name is Jennifer Yock. And you are Mom's mom, the Mission Operation Manager's mom. I am. I'm Lois Mays, Alice Bowman's mom. You're not proud or anything, are you? Oh, no, not at all. Have you been following this mission for a long time, along with Alice? Yes. In fact,

all of us were here in January of 2006, and it wasn't a go. So we had to take all our young kids back home, but we watched that one on TV. But we've been here ever since for Pluto and all of it. So right from the launch, even though it didn't work out the first time. Yes, indeed. You as well? Are you as much into this as your sister? Oh, yes. I have three children, and we were all here, like my mom said, at the launch. I had to drive them all back to Richmond, Virginia to get them back in school the next day. Alice has talked at their elementary schools and been involved in their middle schools, and

I've been supporting her all the way. It's very exciting. I think I was more nervous watching this today than she was, maybe. That's got to be an amazing experience for you to be sitting out here. You've known her since she was born and since you were born, right? And there she was on screen. She was the person who told us everything's going well. That is correct. And, you know, from an early age, I knew she was going to do something outstanding and great. Didn't know what it was going to be, but she surpassed anything I could have thought of.

Is she a good big sister? Yes, she is. I had to watch a lot of Star Trek and all those things, but I did, even though we fought over who got to sit where on the sofa, but it was all good. Congratulations to her, of course, but also to you for being able to share this in the special way that you get to as family. Thank you so much. It's great.

Proud day for us. Yes. And it was that afternoon, just as John Spencer said, that the first close encounter data arrived. That was reason enough for another NASA TV broadcast from APL. I don't know about all of you, but I'm really liking this 2019 thing so far. We're here to tell you that last night, overnight, the United States spacecraft New Horizons conducted the farthest exploration in the history of humankind and did so spectacularly.

Thousands of operations on board the spacecraft had to work correctly in order for us to be able to tell you this, and now we know that it all did. And so let me turn it over to our mission operations boss, Alice Bowman, to say a little bit more about that. Thanks, Alan. We had a great support with Madrid Station, Deep Space Network, 70 meter. You saw that we locked up to telemetry on the spacecraft. Everything looks great.

And we are definitely looking forward to getting down the science data so all of our scientists and the world can see what the outer solar system, the origins of our solar system have have to hold for us? What surprises? As we speak, right now, signals from the spacecraft are coming back across the solar system at the speed of light. They're currently about halfway back to Earth. And overnight tonight, the science team will be analyzing the first high-resolution images, which we'll be able to show you tomorrow.

Now, the image that I'm about to show you is the best image of Ultima that we got pre-Flyby, and it's okay to laugh, but it's better than the one we had yesterday. It all, there it is. Meet Ultima. Yeah, we actually have a formal science team meeting, as Alan said, starting on the 15th. And, you know, after everybody has regrouped and been at their home institutions looking at the data, we'll come back and trade stories about what we found.

Everybody is going to be looking intensively. January is going to be an extremely intensive month. It just keeps getting better and better. I mean, the science team has... Yeah, I think what is striking home with me is that we can build a spacecraft on Earth, and we send it out billions of miles away from Earth, and it sends us back all this wonderful data that we get to look at

and learn more about our world, our solar system. Long after that power is so much less that we can't turn around and communicate to Earth, that will keep going on and on. And that's a bit of all of us on that spacecraft that will just continue after we're long gone here on Earth. Chris. Thank you, Chris. I just wanted to say it's an amazing thing when a nation pulls together to collect the funds to do this challenging accomplishment, and then the team pulls together, sleepless nights, double-checking calculations. We have two teams from the East Coast and the West Coast, everybody working together, and I'm just thankful to be a part of it.

And I'm thankful that we can share all this with all of you as well. And I just want to close. I'm going to echo a little bit of what Chris said. I want to say thank you. Thank you to the entire New Horizons team. Thank you to APL and SWERA and all of our other partners. Thank you to NASA for selecting our team to go and do this mission to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

And frankly, thank you to the United States for being the kind of country that it is that makes history this way in front of the whole world. Thank you. But wait, there's more. I had to catch my flight out of Baltimore on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 2nd. It meant cutting it close, but I could not leave APL

before the world was presented the first really decent image of Ultima Thule. Here are portions of that NASA TV webcast. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where a new world is being revealed before our very eyes. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is giving us our first close-up look at the Kuiper Belt object, Ultima Thule.

And everything that we're going to tell you is just the tip of the iceberg. We have far less than 1% of the data that's stored aboard the solid-state recorders on New Horizons already down on the ground. Here's where we were just a couple of days ago on December 31, 2018. This was humanity's best image of Ultima Thule made by New Horizons at a range of about half a million kilometers out.

Well, that image is so 2018. Meet Ultima Thule. Just like with Pluto, we could not be happier. What you're seeing is the first contact binary ever explored by spacecraft. It's two completely separate objects that are now joined together. And then tomorrow we're going to show you even more because stereos come into the ground, composition information's coming to the ground. We're looking for the atmosphere and that data has just landed. So we'll have a lot more to tell you tomorrow as well. But let me say

that bowling pin is gone. It's a snowman if it's anything at all. And, you know, we have to start thinking about some provisional names and particularly we need names right up front for the two lobes so that we can refer to them individually.

Now being scientists, we're not all that creative with words, so what we've decided to do is name one lobe Ultima and the other Thule. The big one is obviously Ultima. It's pretty easy to remember. How's that? Go New Horizons. Go NASA. The encounter is over.

New Horizons is headed further and further from the warmth of our sun. We won't know for at least months if it will visit yet another Kuiper Belt object, one that it may itself find. The data gathered during the Ultima flyby will flow back to the Deep Space Network for the next year and a half, spooling slowly but surely from the spacecraft's onboard recorders. This mission, already a grand success for its unveiling of Pluto, will continue to make history. All of us at the Planetary Society thank and congratulate

the hundreds of people who made it possible. And I thank the JHU Applied Physics Lab for hosting the greatest New Year's Eve celebration ever. Time to close that grand celebration of planetary science and planetary exploration with Bruce Batts, the chief scientist for the Planetary Society. And he is back to tell us what's up in the night sky, I suppose. Ultima Thule, but not that we're going to be seeing it with the naked eye.

Welcome. If you squint really hard. And say, I wish I could three times and click your heels. Welcome, welcome, welcome. What can we see in the night sky? three times and click your heels. Welcome, welcome, welcome. What can we see in the night sky? We have a total lunar eclipse coming up on the night of the 20th or 21st, depending on your time zone. The maximum total lunar eclipse will be at 512 UT on the 21st. That's 2112 Pacific Standard Time on the 20th. And it'll be visible across most of North America, South America, the Eastern Pacific, the Western Atlantic, Western Europe, and Western Africa. And if that wasn't enough for you, partial lunar eclipse will be visible in other parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia.

So it should be very, very cool. Let's see. We also have another really cool conjunction that's going to happen in the pre-dawn sky. So we've got Jupiter is currently below super bright Venus in the pre-dawn east, but they snuggle up next to each other on January 22nd, and then Jupiter takes the lead and heads up higher in the sky after that. Conjunction junction. takes the lead and heads up higher in the sky after that.

Conjunction Junction. What's your function? All right, on to this week in space history. 2005, the Huygens probe successfully landed, went through the atmosphere, took measurements and landed on Titan. And in 2008, Messenger completed its first flyby of Mercury, finally showing us the side of Mercury that we hadn't seen before up close and personal. That was another one of those applied physics lab missions Messenger was. It was indeed.

All right, we move on to Random Space Fact. And of course, I could have recorded like 10 celebrity Random Space fact intros had I had my wits about me. But I never do when I'm on location. Did you want to impersonate them? I did get Andy Chaikin impersonating Carl Sagan, but I didn't include it in the show. So we'll get him to do that when we talk to him about his new book sometime soon. Well, maybe we can get you impersonating Andy impersonating Carl. Wouldn't that be entertaining?

Just hold your breath, everybody. Maybe not. All right. So I'm guessing you've been talking about 2014 MU69 a little bit in this show. You think? And you may have mentioned it is the first object to be targeted as the, and here's where I draw a distinction, the primary target for a flyby that was discovered after the visiting spacecraft was launched. And I point out the distinction because there were moons of other bodies that had been studied during flybys that were actually discovered after spacecraft launch.

But this is the first place which was actually the target of where they were going that they didn't even know it existed until several years after launch. That is very interesting. That was implied, but not overtly stated by anybody until you. So thank you. I am overt. Now we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, in their current orbits, to you, in their current orbits, which object gets farther from the sun at some point in its orbit, Pluto or 2014 MU69? One of the rare binary answer questions. Don't know what that meant. I meant there were two answers to choose from, but I'm not sure I said that well. How'd we do, Matt?

We did very well, particularly for a holiday period like this, since all these came in just about the time that data was coming back from New Horizons. Stephen Donaldson in Hagerstown, Maryland, longtime listener, I think, first time winner, he said it was Pluto, much to some people's surprises. Pluto's orbit takes us past 2014 MU69. Yes, indeedy-do. Pluto's got quite the elliptical orbit and goes out significantly farther than 2014 MU69. But when the encounters happened for New Horizons, Pluto was, of course, much closer to the Sun. Hey, congratulations, Stephen. You are going to get that set of five kick asteroid stickers from the Planetary Society Chop Shop Store at chopshopstore.com and a 200-point

itelescope.net astronomy account. Joseph Murray in Hoboken, New Jersey. However, Ultima Thule is the ultimate winner in the other two distance categories, perihelion of apparently 42.3 versus Pluto's 29.7 AU astronomical units, and a semi-major axis of basically 44.5 AU versus a little bit less than 40 AU. So I guess, you know, if you average it out, Ultima Thule is still the winner in terms of distance from us. I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Well, we're looking at it. Steve Wienel of Antelope, California. Keep in mind that he's a Californian. He simply says, wow, far out, man. We got that from a few other people as well. We also got this from David Douthat. David Douthat in Charlestown, West Virginia. It's a little ditty.

It's basically a limerick, not a full-fledged poetic effort as we get from our poet laureate. But I was entertained. Here we go. Bruce asked us to calculate truly whether Pluto, our Ultima Thule, goes further out from the sun. Well, Pluto is the one, since its orbit is much more unruly. I thought you'd like that one. I did, I did. We got one more that we should mention, and it is not about this mission, but about the one that we talked about on last week's show in our main segment, Osiris-Rex at Bennu. And are you one of those, Bruce, who has been sort of using air quotes whenever you talk about Osiris-Rex orbiting?

I'm doing air quotes right now around Bennu. I'm imagining it. No, I actually, but I was curious and fascinated to learn the true answer. It's awfully hard to orbit such a tiny body, but apparently, what did we learn, Matt? We learned from Jeroen Gerard. He's on the OSIRIS-REx navigation team for the company Kinetics, which also did a lot of the navigation, is doing it for New Horizons. He says it is actually an orbit. There's no need for the air quotes. One orbit takes about, get this, 61 hours, in spite of the fact that OSIRIS-REx never gets

more than about two kilometers from Bennu. So that caught a lot of us by surprise. I bet it caught a lot of people on the mission by surprise. It really is orbiting that little rock. Yeah, it's quite clever. He also talks about how they choose a plane that I would phrase it as least affected by solar radiation pressure. You know, things that push solar sails and spacecraft in low-gravity orbits. Got to take all that into account, I guess, when this kind of object is what you're orbiting. I guess with that, we're ready for a new one.

So we talked about there's a total lunar eclipse. When is the next total lunar eclipse, total lunar eclipse, as seen from the Earth's surface so people can't get squirrely and talk about seeing it from, you know, other places. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until Wednesday, January 16th of this new year at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And we're going to give you a set of those five kick asteroid stickers from that kick asteroid campaign that Bruce Betts worked with Chop Shop to come up with these.

Also a 200 point itelescope.net astronomy account from that nonprofit network of telescopes you can use to observe stuff throughout the cosmos. And this is back. Robert Kirson's great book about Apollo 8 rocket men that we talked to Robert Kirson about not long ago on this show, just before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 moon encounter, lunar encounter. We have the book to give away still because the previous winner, he heard our conversation about it, liked it so much, he went out and bought the book. And so he wants to make it available to somebody else. So you just might get yourself a copy of Rocket Men, published by Random House. And that's it. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about your favorite leaf shape.

Thank you, and good night. You ever thought about that, Matt? No, I've thought about leaf shapes, but you know what? I picked up a little bit of the pine droppings from our Christmas tree and put them in my pocket this morning as I was taking the tree out. So I'm going to go with that. It's not even a leaf. It's a needle. It's a dropping, apparently.

needle. It's a dropping, apparently. That's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist for the Planetary Society, dropping facts and leaves and other stuff for us every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its farsighted members. 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.