Hello. Good evening. It's great to see everybody here. It's a delight for me to introduce tonight's ideas festival speaker to you. I'm Stephen Colicott. I'm a professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the College of Engineering here at Purdue. And I'm also the associate head for engagement in the school and so introducing such an engaging speaker as my friend Dr. Alan Stern tonight is one of my very enjoyable tasks. Our program tonight has two parts. First will be a presentation by Dr. Stern. On the second part we have some question and answer and you'll see the microphones down front here. You'll need to come down front to those and Alan will point at whose turn it is. This event is recorded and live-streamed just for your information there. We do ultimately have a time limit tonight. I will be the bad guy who comes out and says okay we only have time for two more questions and I apologize in advance for that. So Dr. Alan Stern is presently the associate vice president of space science and engineering division at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But that job title is really far too bland to describe what Alan does on each day. We welcome Alan here and his role is much better known role as the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and which means he is the top person starting with writing a successful proposal with the team to all the way through all the science content and the mission operations and so what a remarkable job. And New Horizons of course is a team effort and I want to point out to our students here much like the student teams that launch suborbital science payloads such as on Blue Origin and other commercial suborbital rocket companies. It's just like what our students are doing. So Dr. Stern's resume is both lengthy and impressive and it's too lengthy to detail here. So I just want to point out a few recent highlights for you. Alan was appointed by our nation's leadership to serve on our country's National Science Board which directs our National Science Foundation. In the next few months Alan will complete his duties as chair of the NASA Planetary Protection Review Board and another highlight Alan has served as the NASA Associate Administrator of the Science Missions Directorate which means he was in charge of all NASA science missions and basically reported to only one person the NASA administrator and so honestly this list of Alan's achievements goes on and on. So I'll stop here with this very abbreviated list and ask you to welcome to produce Ideas Festival and Arsescu Centennial the principal investigator of the historic and the most astounding New Horizons Space Exploration Mission Dr. Alan Stern. Steve. Dr. Collagott you're going to need these. Hello. Thank you Steve for that great introduction. It's great to be here. The last time I was at Purdue was 10 years ago so it's great to be back. Great to talk to you about my favorite space mission of all the ones I've had the privilege of being involved in. I probably don't know most of you so I thought we'd just get this out of the way right away just see what kind of an audience this is. Could I have a show of hands up front for whoever thinks Pluto's a planet. Okay good crowd. Okay all right all right good so what what I'm going to do is talk to you a little bit about this whole mission this whole enterprise that ultimately involved 2,500 men and women to pull this off the farthest exploration in the history of humankind the farthest worlds ever explored. This picture is a true color picture of Pluto taken by the New Horizons spacecraft on the morning of Tuesday the 14th of July 2015 just hours after making the first exploration of Pluto and its system of moons. This picture was taken when the spacecraft was in the shadow of Pluto for one of our experiments and it's looking back at Pluto with its atmosphere in true color it really is a blue sky backlit by the sun and this is not the most scientifically important image of the mission by a long shot but it's my favorite it's absolutely my favorite first I think it's hauntingly beautiful but second it also has some special meaning how many of you have seen again a show of hands how many of you have seen those famous Apollo 8 photographs of the earth rising over the limb of the moon right that meant we're really there I worked on this project from its inception in 1989 until 2015 to get it done it's 26 years this picture is taken from the far side of Pluto and it took 26 years to get to the far side of Pluto and that's why this picture is absolutely my favorite but don't worry I'll show you many more and I'm going to tell you about many of the things that we learned from this truly epic journey in which we built we designed and built a spacecraft and flew it all the way across our solar system now that sounds like science fiction but it's not people working hard mostly engineers but also flight controllers and scientists and accountants and secretaries public relations people formed a team and did something larger than life because they were a team and this is the story of New Horizons so I have a little bit of time to tell you about it I'm going to do that and then I'm going to tell you about some of the nerdy science some of the things that we discovered and then we're going to talk about what if we return what if we send a spacecraft back to do a more in-depth job I'd like to start with this picture who knows what this is it's the best picture of Pluto ever made before New Horizons this is it this is all we had and it's just a blob it's just a blurry blob and this picture was taken with the biggest and the baddest gun we have in astronomy the Hubble Space Telescope you cannot do better but because of Pluto's distance billions of miles away literally billions of miles away this is all you get now I heard some people chuckle it's okay I took this picture with the Hubble I was principal investigator of this program and I can tell you this picture was revolutionary when it was first taken it was the first time Pluto was ever resolved other than as a point of light and from this we wrote scientific papers that were peer reviewed and published a whole series of them can't you see the northern polar cap right you really this is tough to work from images like this and this is why we send spacecraft to the planets is you have to go there and be much closer and I'd like to illustrate that point here is a beautiful picture of a planet our planet the earth taken from close range and with an image like this you can tell what's going on you can learn that there are continents and oceans and weather patterns you can learn a lot from just a single image like this but how about that blurry image of Pluto not so much a few years ago right around the time of the Pluto flyby in 2015 I asked one of my postdocs Amanda Zangari to take this picture and pixelate it to the same resolution as the Hubble space telescope best ever image of Pluto there it is now what could you learn from this it's pretty obvious not much again this is why we go to the planets and I want to just drive that point home one more time and show you this who knows what we're looking at I heard Mars it's a good try but it's completely wrong you say you really can't tell unless you go there so it took a long time to pull this off I said that we started in 1989 I was in graduate school first of all it's a very expensive enterprise to do planetary exploration so you have to raise in this case about a billion dollars and it took a very long time it took us 14 years to get approval for the funding and we had to try many different keys to try to unlock that door and for the people who were at it at the beginning making the scientific case for why we should do this we went through a whole series of studies and you see those there there's Voyager on the left that was the precursor to New Horizons but then there was Pluto 350 and then Marinermark 2 and then Pluto Fast Flyby and so forth and so on and every one of those failed to ever get off the drawing board to ever get funded we tried different approaches that delivered different amounts of science at different costs with different speeds for the mission and other combinations of parameters Only New Horizons the right most spacecraft drawing in that picture ever got off the drawing board all the rest just paper studies but every time that we failed we had to look at ourselves and say how bad do you want this because that didn't work if we really want to do this we need to try something else that was pretty easy the first couple of times but it really took persistence and we could have walked off the stage we could have after two or three tries said we tried everything we can think of there's that old fighter pilot saying you know the plane is crashing and he said I tried a I've tried b I've tried c I've tried everything I can think of now what do I do what do I think of next and that's kind of how we treated this we really went to the mat for it and there are a few dozen people in this country who stuck with this from 1989 until 2003 when we got it funded the reason we really ultimately got it funded is because of a very important discovery maybe the most revolutionary discovery in my field in the field of planetary science in the late 20th century and that was that unlike the way that many of us were taught the solar system does not just consist of four little rocky planets near the sun and four giant planets Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune somewhat further out with a little footnote called Pluto orbiting farther Pluto actually turned out in the 1990s to be the first discovered of a whole population of small planets we now call dwarf planets and you see these worlds here we believe we have discovered almost two dozen of them they're the size of continents Pluto itself is about the size of North America so it's a big place but these are much still much smaller worlds and we believe from forensic evidence around the solar system that the solar system made several hundred or possibly a thousand of these dwarf planets and when it was realized that that completely reshaped our view of how planets form and the population census of our solar system when we realized that all the first five decades of planet planetary exploration had concentrated on the four rocky terrestrial planets and the four giant planets but we hadn't been the most populous class of planet in the solar system that's what caused our national academy of sciences to rank this as the number one priority for planetary exploration is the first mission to the dwarf planets the first mission this whole new class and then NASA conducted a competition so NASA announced that there would be a mission to Pluto and any team could form and send a proposal in by a certain date as long as that proposal met a certain list of scientific objectives and could fit within a certain cost cap and could accomplish the mission by a certain date which by the way was the year 2020 and as long as you can meet those three criteria anybody could propose so we formed a team called New Horizons and there were competitor teams from other institutions and all of us had the same amount of time we turned in proposals that are about that thick like an old New York City phone book or something with engineering designs and project designs and budgets and management plans and everything else and then NASA had experts review all those proposals and they conducted oral examinations and quiz this on the things that we weren't clear about and at the end of that process they selected our mission New Horizons in November of 2001. Now there's an old story it's a true story by the way that the day that John Kennedy President Kennedy announced that the Apollo program was being started which NASA had wanted for years to land humans on the moon that the head of NASA called a meeting of his senior staff and said well we got what we asked for now what do we do that's how we felt when we won New Horizons because the award letter that I got from NASA dear Dr. Stern we're pleased to inform you gave us a budget that was only 20 percent of the budget of Voyager two dimes on the dollar so we were basically asked to do something that had never been done before not just go to the farthest worlds but to do it at a breakthrough price point and we were given a launch window that was only four years in the future about half as long as any previous deep space mission like this had taken to build it so we did it twice as fast five times less expensively and so then we got started and to make this work we had to make many compromises I like to think they were intelligent compromises for example we built a fully redundant spacecraft so that every system is twinned inside there's two sets of thrusters and two sets of navigation units two sets of radios two sets of everything with only a couple of exceptions but we couldn't afford two rockets and two spacecraft so unlike Voyager or the pioneers or if you know the history of robotic space exploration unlike those early missions like the mariners we couldn't afford to fly two in case one didn't get it right or one blew up at the launch pad or one failed in flight we had to build a very reliable single spacecraft to do this we had to make other other choices i'll give you an example on the side of that spacecraft drawing sort of towards the top and I don't have a laser in my hand but you see that gray gray affair that's sticking out looks sort of like a hair curler it's not a hair curler it's a nuclear power generator and because we're going so far from the sun we couldn't afford there's no way to use solar arrays because the sunlight is so faint but those nuclear power generators called rtgs cost almost a hundred million dollars a pop we couldn't afford to have two like the voyagers or four like the cini probe the Saturn we could only afford one so we had to make compromises in our communication system that to get it in the power budget because we could only have a certain amount of power in order to to make the mission affordable that gave us very low data rates so well then when we got to Pluto we knew it would take us more than a year to transmit all the data back to the earth had we had higher power transmitters and more power by having more nuclear power generators we could have gotten all that data back very quickly that's an example of these intelligent compromises that we had to make another thing i wanted to talk about because there's so many students here who will be involved in in some of them in space exploration more of them in more generally in aerospace but whatever you're involved in it took tremendous commitment from the team men and women who had only those four years to design build test and launch that spacecraft and realize that that launch window that we had in january of 2006 which was three weeks long was the only launch window to Pluto for another decade had we missed that launch window we would not have launched until the middle of the this decade so people were working and i'm not exaggerate people were working 52 weeks a year nights and weekends for four years and two months to make this happen and the commitment that this team showed i think is almost unparalleled i can't tell you as as the principal investigator the p i i like to say i'd say p i often stands for the principal instigator how proud i was of this team because no matter how many problems we encounter they overcame every single one of them i never heard people complain it's my anniversary it's my birthday it's this or that they just worked they were on a mission in every sense of the word so this is the spacecraft that we built this is new horizons this is a picture taken of new horizons down in florida just a few weeks before we put it up on top of our launch vehicle to send it on its journey i like this picture for a lot of reasons one is there are people standing all around it so you can see it's very small the whole spacecraft is about the size of a baby grand piano it only weighs about a thousand pounds with the fuel that's on board you can see the dish antenna at the top that we use to communicate with the earth you can see the power generator the rtg that i spoke about a few minutes ago protruding over to the left and you can see the superstructure of the spacecraft because all the the gold shiny thermal blankets haven't been installed yet so you really get a feeling for what the spacecraft truly looks like when you open the hood and then this is our launch vehicle the atlas five built by lockheed martin now built by united launch alliance but this was before ula existed um this is a very large rocket now when i was a little boy i used to shoot off model rockets and i used to molons wash cars to get money to get better and better rockets all the time and i you can't imagine how much fun it was for me to order this baby because we really wanted performance we built a very small lightweight spacecraft and we bought the biggest rocket anybody would sell us this is the biggest rocket in the u.s launch inventory at that time 12 years ago and we bought it with every upgrade in the book it was so much fun i'll take all five solid rocket boosters the lightweight nose cone everything we'll put a special purpose third stage on board that nobody had ever done before we really soup this baby up and it's big um if you go to indianapolis sometime go downtown and find a 25 story building that's how big this rocket is it's big and i'm going to show you a video of the launch in a few minutes so when you watch this it's hard to appreciate even on a big screen this is a downtown building taking off vertically okay this you will see the rocket not just launch it'll leap off the launch pad because we basically launched it empty this thing is built to launch school bus size satellites and we put this little new horizons hood ornament on it and so it lifts off at two g's you'll see it cross a cloud deck about 10 seconds after launch it's two miles high the downtown building is now 10 000 feet high it went supersonic in half a minute and eight minutes after it left the pad it was orbiting the earth 18 000 miles an hour to get started so you'll have a chance to see this but i did want to make one other point how many of you ever built model rockets okay great actually more than think Pluto's a planet okay well that's all right so when i built model rockets i could never get the decal on straight and i just want to point out that nasa has figured that technology out went on per this is a big decal you can see the people next to it that worked perfectly um and uh and i also want to show this picture which is this is new horizons inside the nose cone of this monster atlas five that's the nuclear power generator that's protruding right there this was the day that we fueled the nuclear power generator with the plutonium glowing hot at a couple thousand degrees and then it was radioactively hot and so we wanted to close the hatch on the rocket so that radiation um would be absorbed by that hatch um and uh as soon as they fueled it they uh they said we have time for a few pictures so they let the senior people on the project get their pictures and as principal investigator i asked to go last and in part that was out of courtesy to the other people that worked hard but also i knew this would be the last picture ever taken before the hatch was closed this is the last time anybody ever saw this they literally put the hatch on and by the way for any of you who are superstitious this was on friday the 13th of january 2006 things seem to have worked out just fine so let's see the launch of new horizons just six days later this is atlas launch control at t minus 10 nine eight seven six five four three two ignition and liftoff of nasa's new horizons spacecraft on a decade solid rocket motors each of those casings is about 70 feet tall so it's much taller than this building they come off as you saw in two sets in two waves so they don't collide with one another and then the vehicle can really accelerate because it's much lighter now also it's already very high above the upper fringes of the atmosphere so watch closely you see the two panels come off that's the nose cone so now the spacecraft is exposed to the space environment at the tip of the sphere of a spear as it's accelerating to orbital speed yeah then it went behind that cloud that's it in eight minutes it was in earth orbit we flew halfway around the earth to the mathematically calculated injection point to refire the engines to take us out of earth orbit and on our way to jupiter for a gravity assist and this spacecraft is so light and this rocket so powerful that when we launched new horizons it became and still is the fastest spacecraft ever launched and i could tell you mock numbers and kilometers per hour and all that it won't mean much let me illustrate how fast this spacecraft was traveling when i was a little boy in Apollo missions we launched the moon they would launch at 25 000 miles an hour and as many of you probably know it took three days to reach the moon new horizons did the trip to the moon in nine hours nine hours and we continued that speed across the entirety of our solar system for a decade 24-7 52 weeks a year nearly a million miles per day every day for nine and a half years we launched in january of 2006 we got our gravity assist from jupiter 13 months later fastest trip ever to jupiter 13 months the previous spacecraft had taken six and a half years um and then off across what looks like nothing it's just on a view graph it just oh it's just a few inches right we traveled at a million miles a day or almost that throughout the entirety of two obama administrations to cross an ocean of space the entirety of the solar system two and a half billion miles from jupiter billion with a b from jupiter to pluto which we intercepted in july of 2015 the fuzzy ring around the solar system is called the kuiper belt where pluto lives and where the dwarf planets most of them also live and i'll say a little bit more about our exploration of the kuiper belt that came after the exploration of pluto later in this talk now the actual flyby many of you might remember seeing pictures from pluto's they were first coming down and everything but it was actually a two-year flight operation on the way during that that almost decade-long flight we spent our time planning the assault on pluto all the software for the spacecraft all the plans all the backup plans all the crew training the ground control crew there about 50 of us all of that and the spacecraft was um the first spacecraft to extensively hibernate on the way there so it took care of itself for the most part we would wake it up for course corrections for navigating for tests but mostly it was sleeping and we on the ground we're doing the work of all that planning and training and getting ready for a one-shot flyby of the pluto system and there's there's no second new horizons if we get it wrong there's no propulsion that lets us loop back and try again this is a one-shot after what was essentially a 26-year enterprise from idea to execution and in fact if it went wrong that would have been that so we did our utmost to make sure that we were prepared for everything um and it turned out there were some twists and turns along the way but it all worked out well one of the challenges was a navigation challenge which was in order to conduct some of the experiments we had to fly through pluto's shadow that picture that I showed you at the outset taken in pluto shadow proves that we did all that right but in order to do that we had to hit a little window in space there was only 40 by 60 miles a little rectangle that sounds like a barn door big barn door right it's probably bigger than this county but when you're aiming from three billion miles away it's not a very big target to aim at and we went right down the middle of that pike we actually ended up only a few miles off target after all of that and that's a testament to our navigation team and our and our mission control team um but we also in order to get everything right to make all the observations worked out pluto because it's moving through space at thousands of miles per hour while the spacecraft is flying by at 32 thousand miles an hour and all of its satellites are orbiting each at a different speed when you work out all the arithmetic when you do the math we had to arrive we calculated in order for the spacecraft with its turn capabilities navigation capabilities etc we had to arrive plus and minus 450 seconds of a pre-programmed time after nine and a half years that works out to plus and minus nine minutes after nine years i have to tell you yesterday i arrived at the indianapolis airport on an unnamed airline that could not get within nine minutes just to get me from colorado but new horizons arrived at pluto after nine and a half years only 86 seconds off target and best of all it was 87 seconds early so we did all that and let me tell you a little bit about what we found this is a kind of a family portrait a true color picture of pluto and three of its five moons pluto in the lower right um and then up as you move to the upper left it's very large moon called sharon which was discovered in 1978 from the earth um and sharon for reference i said pluto is about the size of the continental united states sharon's about size the state of texas it's a little deceptive in this image because sharon's actually closer than pluto so it looks like it's too big to be just the size of texas but it is and then two of the smaller moons um uh pluto has four small moons and the two that are shown here are nicks and hydra whoops this is the uh the the binary planet pluto and sharon up close shown in in enhanced color to bring out more detail and you can see just from looking first of all this looks like a science fiction planet doesn't it i mean you never see anything like this right first we've never been to a binary planet system the pair which has been orbiting together out in the outer solar system for billions of years they don't look anything alike pluto is very bright and very colorful because there are atmospheric processes and climate processes that keep it bright and sharon is just an icy satellite um kind of dingy not not as interesting um at least at first appearance these are the small satellites forget the dots that's for a discussion about craters that are identified by those dots but just to show you those those objects which are about the size of counties are made of pure water ice with a little bit of ammonia ice mixed in with it they're very bright they're nearly as reflective as freshly driven snow they're lumpy because they're too small to draw themselves into spheres and from using those craters to determine how old they are that is because we know the rate of it's cratering out there and if we count the number of craters we can determine the age of a surface or at least get a rough approximation of that so it turns out you know it's kind of like the experiment if you were to go outside out of this building when it's raining with a sheet of paper the longer you hold the paper out the more dots are going to appear for the rain the older surfaces the more craters that are on it we can tell from counting these craters that these moons are as old as the planet they're four billion years old very big clue to the formation system this is the big moon sharon seen up close it's a very battered world everything you're seeing here is made of water ice that entire surface is made of water ice across the equator north poles at the top that's the orange cap on the top but across the equator left to right you see that giant canyon system that canyon is 10 times the size of the grand canyon it's 10 times deeper 10 times wider and 10 times longer it's the biggest canyon in our solar system and it was caused by the freezing of all that water ice if you've ever frozen water ice you know in your fridge and a glass and crack the glass that's exactly what happened here but on a vast scale when the water ice froze after the formation as sharon was cooling off the water ice expands by by dint of freezing and the end result is it to relieve stress the world's cracked all the way along the equator for more than a thousand miles if you look at the north pole it's pretty unusual we've seen a lot of polar caps in the solar system most of them look like earth's polar cap or marzes which you've probably seen they're bright and snowy and look like you know just a white polar cap we've never seen kind of a reverse polar cap this orangey stuff actually turns out to be the result of gases that escaped from Pluto's atmosphere and plated out at the and condensed at the coldest places on sharon at the north and south poles and then were processed by radiation to turn this ruddy kind of a color whoops too many well i'm not sure if i can back up because the only other button is the red button so i don't know if that will turn off the machine or back it up or go to the first slide so let's try it see what happens oh just backs it up okay we're safe okay i know what you're thinking the guy supposedly can get a spacecraft to pluto he can't work this but we didn't practice that beforehand okay so this is an image i'm going to show you a number of images of pluto and talk to you about some of the things that we learned in almost every slide that i'm going to show you for the next half dozen or nine slides something like that in the upper right you'll see a picture of the entire globe of pluto and this is called a context image and the little green box the inset in the upper right the green box within the green box is telling you where we're looking on the surface of the planet and so here what we've done in the computer is to take literally a hundred images from new horizons put them together in a mosaic and wrap them in a computer on a sphere to simulate what you would see if you were aboard a spacecraft flying a thousand miles above pluto this is what you would see over that now most of you know because you've seen pictures of pluto before it's the it's the little planet with a big heart right that heart is a nitrogen molecular nitrogen glacier with a million square kilometers of surface area in other words it's the size of texas and oklahoma combined the heart shaped region this is the left ventricle if you will the western side of the heart is that giant bright surface which is all made of nitrogen snow and you can see it's ringed by mountain ranges we believe but don't know for sure that all of that nitrogen is sitting in a giant basin caused by an enormous impact of a quipper belt object probably a hundred miles across that hit pluto very early on excavated this enormous hole in the ground the size of texas and oklahoma combined and lifted those mountains as a result of shock waves from this titanic collision those mountains stretch higher than the rockies in my home state of colorado some of them are as high as almost 20 000 feet tall so all those mountain ranges were lifted up due to that collision and then later that basin was filled up with this nitrogen snow that falls from the atmosphere and we don't know how deep it is we can't confirm this theory because we don't know whether the nitrogen is 50 meters deep or 500 meters deep or five kilometers deep because we didn't have the right type of instrumentation like ground penetrating radars on new horizons to really confirm this theory of the giant impact that created sputnik planisha this giant basin but there are other interesting things going on first of all when you look at that that glacier in detail and i will show you in a picture in just a second you will notice what i call a cellular pattern now please this happened to me in canada as a minute i said the word cellular people are texting that the director of the new horizons mission is talking about life on pluto i'm not i'm talking about geological cells in a glacier okay and these are big they're individually that whole area is the size of texas and oklahoma so these are like the size of giant counties but those cells are caused by a slow roving boil that's taking place in the glacier due to some heat source beneath it that's causing it to overturn again and again i'll prove that to you in a few minutes this is a close-up on that glacier and on the left you can see the northern half the glacier and various details up against the mountain ranges including all sorts of interesting flow patterns in the glacier on the right you see terrains that are that are way to the south with little pits in them those pits are individually miles long they're due to the sublimation it's kind of like an evaporation of the ice down by the equator causing holes that are miles long and and very deep in in the glacier and there are thousands of them as you can see and i'm only showing you a part of it here's here's something else really fascinating this is a picture in New Horizons took 15 minutes after closest approach to pluto looking back and you can see how rugged the terrains are on the surface those rugged terrains immediately taught us that nitrogen ice can't be in a very deep formation most places because nitrogen ice is a very weak material we can make it a laboratory and it's about as strong as garden variety toothpaste so try to build a mountain out of toothpaste even in pluto's weak gravity field it oozes away and collapses under its own weight so the fact that we see these giant steep mountains means that the nitrogen must be a frosting on top of some much stronger substrate the most common building material in the outer solar system is water ice we saw it all over the surface of sharing as i spoke to you about a few minutes ago it turns out we found bare patches on pluto where the nitrogen was missing and we see spectroscopically the fingerprint the spectrum of water ice so this picture of rough topography immediately told us that pluto's crust is made of water ice and that the the nitrogen and the other exotic snows on the surface are are a frosting from the atmosphere but also in this picture you can see pluto's atmosphere these giant haze layers that stretch for thousands of kilometers and they stretch into the sky half a million feet up in these concentric banded layers that no one really expected but which new horizons revealed and we still to this day don't understand the chemistry that makes these haze layers in order to understand that we're going to have to go back with more sophisticated instrumentation and a probe that can dip into the atmosphere and get the composition of those haze layers here's um here's a really interesting place you can see the little green box the little context image we're looking right at the juncture between giant sputnik glacier and the um the older dark terrains immediately to the west and you can see how many craters there are in this very rough terrain by the way this scene is about the size of the state of indiana so this is not a small place uh these terrains we can age date from the number of craters the same way that i described before they date back to the earliest days of our solar system four billion years ago and right next to them out on the glacier you don't see a single crater not one you can see those cells the convection cells that i spoke about and you can see the pits that are caused by the sublimation process what's causing that convection what's the heat source we don't understand it we need to go back we need to have much more like we need a heat maps as one example thermal mappers in order to be able to understand we need that radar that i talked about to find out how deep the ice layers are um but more importantly this glacier no matter where we look million square kilometers we can't find a single crater which means that these are very young surfaces geologically born yesterday this is proof that pluto little pluto the size of barely across the united states a world which we thought before we explored it should have cooled off and its geological engine died like earth's moon billions of years ago but somehow pluto didn't read the textbooks pluto is just happily making new terrains all the time this is the size of texas and it age dates to be born yesterday geologically only millions of years old at the most and here's a complicated plot called a log log plot but as we go around pluto and look at different terrains we find the very old ones like i spoke about we find the very young ones but we also find middle age terrains which shows that pluto has been active in making new types of geology all throughout its history we're not just happening to live at a time that we sent new horizons when pluto was suddenly having a spasm of activity these plots show us from these age dating of different places on pluto the different units were made at different times all through the last four billion years so somehow and the geophysicists don't understand it pluto is generating new terrains and has been doing this over the entire history of the solar system something that was thought impossible for a world this small that it should have died geologically very long ago here's another one which we didn't predict so this is a map that's color coded by altitude the highest altitudes are in yellow and red these are the mountains around the glacier that i spoke to you about that are up to 20 000 feet tall and then down the the lowest terrains down in the glacier that's the purple stuff but what i want you to focus your eye on are those red arrows and that pool of material that's come out of a chute that actually came down that chute where you can see in the lower right um a flow pattern and pulled out in an area about 50 miles across a giant avalanche of titanic scale if this happened in the himalayas it would be world news everywhere somehow on pluto giant avalanches are taking place and look at that surface there's not a crater on it this is taking place today on pluto and then we found ice volcanoes the size of monoloa in hawaii this is one of them we have all kinds of evidence for ice volcanoes and cryo volcanism as it's called all across the the surface of pluto um this this edifice with the hole in the middle that you see there is about a hundred miles across and the hole in the middle is 15 miles deep it's incredible and it has again notice on the flanks no craters this was either recently active or recently constructed but either way somehow pluto has created these ice volcanoes or kept them running for billions of years and this isn't the only one we have three of these and then a whole another type of volcanic um uh province or another part of pluto um that shows another way that pluto is somehow active which we don't understand and we will never understand unless we send another mission back with more detailed imaging and better compositional spectroscopy and these thermal sensors that can tell us if the volcanoes are actually active today etc and then who ordered this a frozen lake on pluto's surface sitting in a hanging valley which we know because we have stereo images that show this is in a valley um in uh mountain ranges to the west of the glacier and this you can see the shoreline around it there's no craters on it it's about 20 miles long it's made of of the same stuff the nitrogen but the thing is you can't have liquid nitrogen on pluto today because the atmosphere has too low a pressure for those of you who are technically trained in other words um this the current surface of pluto can't reach the triple point where liquid can be stable but here's forensic evidence right and you know if you watch csi right there's that one clue every episode this is the same deal this is a forensic a forensic clue that pluto used to have a much thicker atmosphere in fact when you work it out it had to be 10 times higher pressure than mars's atmosphere is today why did pluto have higher pressure for how long did that persist how did those giant craters that were formed by impacts make it through that thicker atmosphere how does this all add up we don't know we had one little flyby through the system we got a first glimpse of this very complicated world this world that's every bit as complicated as the earth or mars and we have very strong circumstantial evidence that beneath the glacier is a global liquid water ocean that's right below those ices the surface which is 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit as you go deeper and deeper and the weight of the ice increases and increases and the temperature goes up as a result because the higher pressure corresponds through the perfect gas equation to higher temperature we get to a place where that water ice that makes up the entire crust of pluto liquefies and there's a global ocean maybe with fish inside over whales plutonian whales or maybe with nothing inside maybe just water but anyway you look at it the fact that pluto could have an ocean and to the right in the upper right is a is an illustration i didn't make but i really like there's the earth on the left and the blue bubble is a sphere that's equal to the volume of all the oceans of the earth and then to its right is pluto the brown ruddy disk and then to the side of it the blue dot is is the calculated estimated size of pluto's ocean which is almost the size of earth's ocean who would have thought who would have thought that if i would have suggested that before the flyby of pluto that would have been laughed out of the room and yet pluto has all of that and if we're lucky this video started we're going to now fly over the surface of pluto's if we were in an airplane using images from new horizons from the north pole down onto the glacier now we're going to take a thousand mile flight in about 60 seconds starting off in those polar terrains where you can look inside the craters and see layering and all sorts of other interesting details and then you see these tracks we believe these tracks are due to dust devils or tornadoes that went across the surface and then we come up onto badlands and eventually onto mountain ranges there's a scale bar on the side in blue it says six miles just for the scale bar so you can see how big these chunks of water ice are that are covered in nitrogen snow and then off into the glacier where you see hundreds of dunes in vast dune fields hundreds of miles long as we fly to the south towards the equator across sputnik glacier all the way down into the equatorial regions this is like the best science fiction world i mean in many ways i like to say that the solar system saved the best for last pluto is totally stunned us and this project with all of its ups and downs and near misses and political intrigues and design problems and test problems and all kinds of things is chronicled in a lot more detail than i could give you here in a book that my co-author david grinspoon and i wrote called chasing new horizons i call this book my hundred lost weekends because it took me two years to get this written and ready for publication but it's and this is an unabashed sales job if you want to read more about new horizons by the book it's now out in paperback so it's not expensive you can order on amazon or in your local bookstore after the fly by of pluto in a year to get all the data back we went on out into the quaiper belt and flew by this object on january 1st new year's day of this year 2019 this object has a license plate name that we found with the Hubble called 2014 emu 69 which is not very easy to remember but we gave it a nickname called ultimate which is a latin phrase for beyond the known world which really literally this object is have you ever seen anything like this even in a sci-fi show even in the expanse no on star trek no nothing like this has ever been seen this is a primordial meaning ancient building block of planets like pluto it's only about 25 miles long so it's tiny i thought i had and maybe this is it yes this is the video there's pluto zoom up on pluto and little ultimately appears right there look how little is it's like we flew another billion miles to rendezvous with one mountain block on pluto right and we did that at 32 000 miles an hour in the darkness of the quaiper boat where it's darker than this room right so we had to hunt this thing down in the dark and fly by it at 32 000 miles an hour and get all the calculations right in order to produce images of it and it's just this wild woolly beast that doesn't look like anything you've ever seen before it's called a contact binary it's two small worlds that came together and they're joined at that neck that bright ring in between them and you can see because these are images made as we flew by at some different angles but it's also very highly flattened almost like rocks that you would skip on a pond how did the solar system do that we had no idea that things like this could form particularly on this vast scale the size of counties and that they could gently merge there's no signs of violence somehow they gently came together and almost docked in fact well when we wrote the paper with 200 of my best friends as co-authors and submitted it to science i use the word docked and one of the referees comments back was you will not use the word docked that is done by by ships piloted by human beings and docking is a result of intelligence find another word so we use the word merger now but they docked okay there all right so this has really been a tremendous mission of exploration and i have a few candid pictures beginning with this one to show you of what it's like to be a part of this not at the beginning when you're designing and building but at the culmination for people who worked 15 years from 2001 to 2015 this is a live shot taken from our science operations room at the moment of the first image being put on the big screen from the Pluto flyby the first high res image and you can see these are all scientists on my team and you can see the excitement in this room and every one of these people was like is this going to work or not right because we got this remote control spacecraft three billion miles away doing its thing with no second chance and i just love this picture because you can feel the energy in it and then three and a half years later when we got to ultimate tully when we did that fly by on new year's eve and new year's day here's the scene in the room right you think that they were excited when the first image came down you can just feel it right that's what that's what real science and real engineering is about and real discovery right is it's actually not just cool and calculating it's actually very emotional and it is you know teamwork like this is just like teamwork on an nfl team that wins the super bowl this is the super bowl of solar system exploration in all of history so far here's another picture from our team these are people that worked on this for three and a half years to make this fly by turn out and you can see that they're pretty happy about it that didn't last long before we went back to nerding out the computer right and the end result of that is you know we made the cover of the rolling stone for geeks science magazine this is um a publication from this may about three three four months after the fly by when we took the cover of science with this beautiful color image of ultimate tooling so i'm going to wrap up this talk a little bit but first i want to talk about what this exploration meant beyond its science did any of you see this bumper sticker or do you have Pluto shirts or any of the paraphernalia that there's now sold everywhere on the web yeah with hearts on it you know this kind of stuff something really magical happened you know when i was growing up and then when i was going to grad school um first missions to new planets were happening every few years i don't remember the first mission to venus i was too young the first mission to mars i was too young but i do remember the first missions to mercury and jupiter and then satyr and urnus and neptune in the 80s and every time that happened it was like a worldwide news event and the same thing happened but it hadn't happened for a generation from 1989 when voyager finished at neptune to 2015 26 years nothing like this had ever happened and a lot of people a lot of jaded people particularly in washington dc said yeah they've seen it all no one will care that's not what happened thousands of people came to our mission control to be there at the fly by and you can see them this is look in the back you see the screen you see the 004 four seconds the closest approach they're going crazy and it was all over the news we were on the cover of 560 something newspapers above the fold the next morning our website took two billion visits in 48 hours yes half of them were my mother but only half she's only so fast um google gave us the google doodle that's little new horizons going by uh pluto um we were on the cover of so many magazines that we lost count in fact this is a true story my next door neighbor called me a week before the fly by and he's a small business owner and he said alan we take seven magazines at our house six of them have come so far this month you or your mission are on the cover of every single one he said the last magazine is cosmopolitan and if you are on the cover of that i'm jumping off my roof so we saved his life we weren't on the cover of cosmo but nasa hadn't seen anything like the web and public response to this exploration since apollo and that's their term not my own right it shows the people in the 21st century love exploration as much as people in the 60s and the 80s did this is a super human i mean no other species even looks at the sky and knows that they are seeing other worlds in space and somehow we our species has figured out how to go explore the universe and that for those of us who have been on new horizons all this time working behind the scenes nights and weekends for 15 years to design and build this one little spacecraft to send out on this risky all by itself across the entirety of our solar system to the very frontier and then pull off this exploration is an unbelievable feeling and to this day now four years after the flyby of pluto i get emails sometimes i run into people in the airport on some airport and i don't even know them and they say you know i worked on new horizons i worked on the rocket i worked on the rtg the nuclear power supply i worked you know i was at Ohio State University when you were testing the antennas i was on this i was on that and i just want to say thank you i've never been a part of any project like this in my entire life and nothing even all the science that we've done makes me feel better than to know that this was so meaningful to people that worked on it and so meaningful to the people of the world all around the world not just in the united states and that we nasa put all this data on the web available to anyone in any country can log in and download images and spectra and everything else and work on this you know we don't just do it for people in the united states we do it for the world it's a it's it's an amazing feeling for all of us who got to be a part of this project i'm going to close by talking about what if we return there are a lot of mysteries to pluto we did not expect it to be this complicated no one could have expected it to be as hard as mars and to be as active as any active world in the solar system we don't understand the glaciers we don't understand the ocean we don't understand the atmosphere we don't understand what generates the geology we don't know what's making the avalanches we don't understand the satellite system none of it because we just went by in a flash and now we know that if we go back we want to be in orbit we want to map the rest of the planet we want to map what we've already seen in higher detail we want to bring other kinds of instrumentation like i spoke about radar is to look down through the depths of the ice and find out how far down it is thermal mappers to see if we can find hot spots like at those volcanoes see if they're currently active we want to put a mass spectrometer in the atmosphere and measure what those hazes are made of we want to do all that and more and to do that requires an orbiter so my company the southwest research institute a very large nonprofit with 3 000 employees 450 in the space division where i work just completed a half million dollar study of how to do a Pluto mission and this is one slide from some of the orbital mechanics that we did and we've designed an entire orbital tour of how you would go about this and it turns out it's very cool you can use the big moon Sharon to make close flybys and use them as gravity assists to tour to motorboat all around the Pluto system with every orbit you make a close flyby of Sharon and Sharon redirects the spacecraft to dip down into the atmosphere to visit other moons to go over different parts of Pluto and over a two-year period we showed and this is complicated when you show all the orbits but you can tour the entire thing with one vehicle and then this is even bigger breakthrough we found that Sharon is powerful enough that when you're done it Pluto when you've mapped it all when you put all those new experiments in the atmosphere when you've done all those other things and got those data sets back Sharon is powerful enough with two more close flybys to actually take you back out of orbit to go on into the Kuiper belt and explore other Kuiper belt objects like ultimatuli and dwarf planets like Pluto so with one mission which can make and these are the the dips are the closest approaches to different satellites that are color coded there we can do all the Pluto system and then we can go on into the Kuiper belt and be the next generation of Kuiper belt explorer too we used to think that would take at least two different spacecraft and two different rockets and now we know we can do it all with one and that's going to be a big cost saver and hopefully we'll get a chance to do that it probably won't be me it'll be some of you that'll have the chance to do that and so i'm going to close with this beautiful true color picture of this beautiful little sci-fi planet on the edge of our solar system the first dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt ever explored with a salute to the new horizons team thank you for coming tonight and and then i'm going to take your questions so thank you very much and we have a bit of an icebreaker and a bribe so there are two microphones and Steven has these cool bumper stickers hand me one of them i think they're the coolest bumper sticker in the space business it says my other vehicle explored Pluto right right i mean somebody's got you know my other vehicle's a truck this is better in any case we have four of them so the first four people to ask questions get here five get get bumper stickers yes well it's nice to be right in close race close there there you go so good thank you so my question is with the decreasing cost of rockets these days there's such great rocket science going on and the price of getting the space is so much cheaper it would seem that it would be cheaper to send out now a lot of planetary explorers with a little bit heavier but a lot cheaper components and will do you think one will that bring us back to the age of mariners and voyagers where we can send five or six up and just hit a bunch of bunch of jupiter's moons and also once we get to that stage what would be the limiting factor would it be manufacturing or cost of rockets or would it be just the bandwidth or the you know rocket scientists and people to interpret the data what would be those limiting factors yeah so if we took advantage of reusable rockets like space x is building and now others as well we could more or less eliminate the cost of the launch could be a four more spacecraft for the same budgets and I think absolutely it turns out the rockets are typically about 20 or 30 of the cost so you couldn't get a factor of two you couldn't fly two for everyone but it would certainly help but we're also now in a revolution where we're building a lot smaller and less expensive satellites and so I know for the close exploration like of the moon and mars and the asteroids that we're now able to get to much cheaper planetary exploration missions that we can send out in much bigger numbers just like you asked about and are there economies of scale when you when you can say hey let's build three or four of this or is it pretty much one person screwing in one component planning out every last thing or is there not really much I'm happy to answer that question but let me just point out that asking the second question does not mean a second bumper sticker okay those are for other people we're going to take turns um yeah absolutely if we could do more we would get an economy of scale and so the second new horizons and a third would each come down the cost curve particularly if you can build them in rapid succession to the same design before parts go obsolete for example okay yes sir okay he's Steven's gonna help you there um how come the image of Pluto was so blurry from Hubble although Hubble can take such good shots of like Andromeda and the sombrero galaxy that's a stupendous question that is a spectacular question so how come Pluto only three billion miles away looks blurry but galaxies that are much farther away look so great it's because those galaxies are really enormous structures and so even though our actual resolution on the galaxy is much worse than Pluto we can put a lot more pixels on them and and therefore see a lot more detail that's a great question enjoy the bumper sticker back over here yeah uh so we learned a lot of very interesting very cool things from our first visit to Pluto so my question is what bodies or moons or anything are you excited to visit for the first time uh and then your future um personally i get to pick i get to be king okay earth's great we need to study the earth more but actually this whole collection of dwarf planets turns out to be very heterogeneous they have different colors and different compositions and different densities so some are made of ice and some are made of rock for example they have different numbers of satellites they're every bit as diverse as for example the four terrestrial planets and we've only been to one of them Pluto so far and it already taught us a tremendous amount of rewriting textbooks so i think missions to these dwarf planets are in order but we also have a lot to learn closer to home to do more detailed missions uh NASA just selected a mission called dragonfly which you might have heard of it's actually going to land a nuclear-powered drone that can fly across the surface of one of Saturn's moons which has rivers of hydrocarbon and lakes that could contain prebiotic chemistry and that's just one example so the future is very bright for planetary exploration and then on top of that we're gonna send people to Mars that's gonna happen and it's gonna happen by the 2030s i knows that because even if this country can't stick to it politically i'm a Tesla owner and i'm pretty sure Elon will next question hi uh i remember when uh new horizons got to Pluto in 2015 yeah and i came in to work that day and i was like very Pluto and all my co-workers are like okay but i don't know it was just it was really cool that was such a great feeling and i i remember that was something that inspired me in my college career um something that you were teasing at was you did that the flyby behind the planet and you were looking at the atmosphere can you talk more about that yeah absolutely sure sure that's a great nerdy question i'm always up for that so the idea is is that um we could probe Pluto's atmosphere by looking at the way the sunlight filters through it and it's not just taking pictures of it although that did show us things like the haze layers our ultraviolet spectrometer is able to watch the way the sunlight is distinct extinguished as a function of wavelength and determine the composition as a function of altitude and it can only be done when you backlight the atmosphere as a probe through it and the brightest thing brighter than any of the stars is the sun so we aim to go across Pluto's shadow in order to put the sun filtering through the atmosphere and look at it with that ultraviolet spectrometer what did you find out about the atmosphere by doing that so we found out a lot of things which mostly need graphs because they're about hydrocarbon chemistry and the rate at which the nitrogen falls off with altitude and the escape rate so we found a very top level about the composition the thermal structure of the atmosphere the escape rate of the atmosphere that turned out to be a thousand times lower than had been predicted by earth-based models and we learned about the haze layers that we really didn't expect all of that thank you yes so Pluto has a very eccentric orbit and i was just wondering what you thought would be different about a long-term mission orbiting Pluto versus you know a fly-by mission compared to some other you know such missions of other planets in the solar system well you know one of the big big lessons of planetary exploration has been you know we do fly-bys first we get the lay of the land and then if if it's high enough priority we go back with more detailed missions first orbiters and then landers and every time we've done that it's been very successful in terms of teaching us a lot more in the case of the Pluto fly-by we flew by but we could only see one side of the planet because we went by so quickly and we really haven't mapped the rest of the planet we also couldn't carry all that kind of new instrumentation that i talked about because in order for new horizons to be light and fast it wasn't able to carry more than the seven scientific instruments that we had and because we were only there on one Tuesday in all of human history we didn't have a chance to see things changing and yet we know this is a dynamic world we're from avalanches to atmospheric phenomena it's changing before our very eyes and so if we go there with an orbiter and stay for years and watch the way that it's changing combined with the new data sets from different types of instrumentation and the ability to map all of the rest of it that we couldn't see and get up close to all of its satellites that we couldn't get to we would learn a lot more thank you yes uh do you expect to see migration of thulins back and forth between Pluto and then Charon and then Charon back to Pluto again if we send a mission there have you have you observed migration of those hydrocarbons back from Charon back to Pluto surface yeah so um so let me translate the question just a little bit for those who don't know as much as this gentleman does the material on the surface of the moon sharon that i showed you that's the ruddy red stuff that makes that polar cap um carries the Latin name fallen which is just a fancy word for hydrocarbon gunk okay and this is the the gases that came off Pluto that i spoke about that have plated out at the north pole where the temperature is literally 15 or 20 degrees above absolute zero so that those molecules are stuck on the surface because it's so cold and then the solar ultraviolet sunlight makes chemistry happen that creates this hydrocarbon gunk called thulins and his question is could the thulins also be going back to Pluto and the answer is absolutely not and the reason is that we can make those thulins in a laboratory and we understand many of their physical and chemical properties we've been making these things for decades in a laboratory they've been seen in other places around the solar system too and they're very stable molecules that can't evaporate because they're very heavy long chain hydrocarbons so at the temperatures on Pluto surface they can't get back up and transit in the other direction they just keep building up and building up that's a great question thank you yeah so earlier in the talk you spoke about somebody instruments you would you wouldn't want to see on a new mission such as thermal sensing or ground pentrating radar you know other types of instruments that you would want on a new mission to Pluto yeah absolutely so i mentioned a mass spectrometer is another example i mentioned thermal mappers as another example those are the four that i mentioned because they're the top of my Christmas wish list but there are lots of other instruments that we would also like to see for example until the 2060s Pluto's southern hemisphere is in polar darkness the same way that Antarctica goes into darkness for months every year but Pluto's year is 250 years long so its polar darkness lasts decades so if we send a mission there in the 30s it's still going to be dark so we want to send very low light level cameras and spectrometers that New Horizons didn't have so we can even map those polar dark terrains so we can get a map of everything that's that's an example another example is we want to do what are called gravity investigations they're not really measuring gravity but they're using gravity to measure the distribution of mass from place to place so we can determine the density of the mountains versus the valleys we can determine exactly how much material is in sputnik planitia glacier we can measure all those things and much more about the subsurface and and get the structure of the interior of the planet as well and there's another long list of other kinds of atmospheric instruments there's going to be a big shootout they're going to be 20 or 30 ideas for scientific instruments that'll compete in the top 12 or so we'll get selected for the mission okay thanks yeah so most of the nitrogen that was observed is the beta phase nitrogen and i know that there was some talk about improving the detection between alpha and beta with the incorporation of carbon monoxide and methane might make it more observable have you guys observed any alpha nitrogen or is it all just been the beta phase i love it when you talk dirty down and dirty geek speak yeah so um in order to separate these different um molecular forms these different phases of nitrogen and the other molecules that you talked about um you need spectrometers that have higher resolution not not being closer but higher spectral resolution so more light gathering power than anything we could afford to fly on new horizons from a mass standpoint and we can those instruments exist on the earth and we put them at the back end of the largest telescopes on the earth and we can see alpha and beta nitrogen in sputnik planitia from the earth now what you can't get from the earth is the high resolution to map from place to place at high detail so what we need to do is go back with much bigger telescopes on that orbiter instead our biggest telescope is only this wide okay it's like a little home built except it's very high tech but it's only this wide we want to go back with meteor class telescopes that gather a lot more light that can actually collect enough signal to have these higher spectral resolution spectrometers to do exactly what you're talking about it's just interesting because of the vast viscosity difference but thanks yeah okay over here left right left right thank you so you had noted that on new horizon all of this distance were redundant they had a copy of each other so during new horizons flight did any of those systems fail and during the flight was there ever a point where you all had to start mentally preparing yourself you know this might this one might not actually work okay great questions two questions two answers so it turns out every here we are four years after the fly by and everything's working it was working at fly by it's working now all the prime systems and all the backup systems now on the day of launch the very first day we were out of the box in space we did have one system go red on us and it started working about three days after launch and has worked for almost 14 years ever since never had a problem so the spacecraft is super healthy and we expect it to be able to operate for 20 more years then you also asked if we ever had a case where we might be worried about whether we would make it and we actually did and some of you might know this story but after flying 3,350 days for 50 something days to reach Pluto 10 days before we arrived on July the fourth 2015 which is a day known for fireworks right my cell phone rang it was project manager calling saying we've lost contact with the spacecraft which is never supposed to happen in in any spaceflight and in fact chasing new horizons opens with that story that phone call people porting in on the fourth of july in sandals and shorts and hawaiian shirts the mission control to try to fix the problem and obviously because you've seen my talk we worked it out but it was a very near-death experience for the spacecraft and it was caused by a human error that we did to ourselves a very subtle programming error but we fixed it yes yeah so you talked a lot about how Pluto is still a dynamic planet and there's still a lot going on in it yeah what do you think what do you think it says about the formation of the solar system and the processes going in it right now that there is like such a dynamic planet so far away from the sun and do you think there's other bodies similar to Pluto that we can find around the Kuiper belt yeah so let me answer your second question first is that we know that the dwarf planets include some that look like very close cousins of Pluto from what we can tell okay so definitely a yes to your second question but what about the formation of the solar system what what is this telling us that's a much harder question to answer and I don't think anybody knows the answer but more than telling us about the formation of worlds like Pluto it's probably telling us that our our understanding of the geophysics and the geological engines that run planets is missing some physics maybe some chemistry too because we're we're not we were not expecting the level of complexity that the geology has has resulted in or the level of activity after so long and to this day there this is four years later there's no accepted theory there's some ideas but no accepted theory for why Pluto is so active it's it's really a mystery which is the best stuff in science right as we found out something new that we don't get yet we'll see okay yes would you talk a little bit about the complications and the complexities of communicating with a satellite at that distance traveling that fast and sort of the power you're of the transmitter you're working with yeah sure getting data back yeah so Pluto's three billion miles away spacecrafts three billion miles away radio waves travel at the speed of light so when you work out the math if we want to send instructions to the spacecraft we launch that as a set of radio commands from the earth and it takes well currently where we are now out in the Kuiper belt it takes six hours to get there and then when the spacecraft receives it and says i got it and sends you back checksums or whatever it takes six more hours just to find it you got it so the round trip is 12 hours so it's like playing chess one move every 12 hours right and when problems come up it makes it a lot harder to fix them because every move requires a half a day before you can get confirmation it worked now you also asked about transmitting data back so the way that we do this is that we have a small transmitter and a small antenna on the spacecraft you saw the size of it it's only about six feet across the dish and the transmitter is only 30 watts 30 watts not like an am radio station it's 30 kilowatts 30 watts and that signal spreads out over four billion miles of space it is incredibly weak when it gets back to the earth so we have receiver antennas in locations around the earth called the nasa deep space network that are the size of football fields and their receivers are cooled by liquid helium to almost absolute zero to eliminate thermal noise and we can pick up the signal of new horizons and send those pictures and spectra and other things back and receive them and make all the beautiful imagery that i just showed you but at the expense that we have to send them at a relatively low data rate compared to your cell phone you know we're all frustrated when you can't download you know a hundred megabit video in 10 seconds flat right new horizons is sending data back to the earth in about a thousand bits per second so a single image will take an hour or two to get to the earth it will travel for many hours in root but to build that image up at a thousand bits per second you know is pixel by pixel pixel by pixel it's like watching the grass grow but think about it it's a 30 watt transmitter billions of miles away that's why it took us a year to get all the data back is we had a whole flash drive gigabits were the stuff to send back at this slow rate but it's amazing that we can do it at all i think i mean from those kind of distances it's just it's just incredible to think about thank you yeah are there any sensors that you really wanted to include on new horizons that you were unable to include or are there any that in hindsight you wish you had included but didn't think to at the time yeah great question of course all the things that we now know tell us what to put on the orbiter right um but you know all those carcasses that i showed you in an early slide the missions that never got off the drawing board they didn't get launched because mostly they were too ambitious and they got out out of control they cost too much and nasa couldn't afford it and they get cancelled and we'd have to start over the great success of new horizons is because we actually practiced appetite control we actually said what's the minimum set of instrumentation to get this the basic scientific objectives of first flyby done and by not trying to add ornaments to the tree and then sink under our own weight if you will metaphorically we actually got the exploration of Pluto done so i wouldn't change a thing because we actually got it done i would send an orbiter next i will just i will just say uh the the people uh at the microphone now we have time for these questions okay we have time for these five questions yes ma'am here's your pr question pr yes okay so in regards to you said there was like a generational aspect to it did you do anything differently was it just luck and when we are in the workforce next in this generation what do we do with mars well i don't quite know how to answer your second question but i'll answer your first question is that we did do things differently than had been done in the old days i mean we put everything out on the web so it was instantly available and we were on twitter and we were on facebook and we were on insta and we were doing all of that so that we were involving people and they could be a part of it you know back in the earliest days like first missions to everywhere else even to neptune in the late 80s you had to be in the room at the jet propulsion lab to feel like you were part of it you could read about it in the newspaper the next morning but you couldn't be sharing in real time like as a as a human event and i think by taking taking advantage of the modern technology we really made a difference okay yeah so coming from a biological perspective you mentioned river with pre-biotic chemistry you also mentioned water inside Pluto so coming from that perspective what are some things that NASA or any other space program wants to explore biologically in in Pluto or in other planets and what measures are they taking right now to explore that okay that's a bunch of questions so first of all i want to clarify that the hydrocarbon river that you mentioned that i had mentioned earlier is not on Pluto that's on another place a planet-sized world a satellite of Saturn called Titan okay so that's not Pluto those things might exist on Pluto but we didn't discover them okay but one of the highest priorities in all of planetary science is to find out if there's life that's evolved or even prebiotic chemistry in other locales around the solar system and one of the other biggest discoveries in in my lifetime in my career besides the fact that the solar system is teeming with dwarf planets and that dwarf planets outnumber all the other types 10 to 1 is that we used to think that the earth was completely unique when we would look out with our telescopes we couldn't find another world that had oceans we were completely wrong turns out there are lots of oceans all around the solar system they're just on the inside instead of sitting on the surface and they're very common all across the middle and outer solar system and the fact that these oceans exist oceans of liquid water at reasonable temperatures where life could evolve is a complete game changer and we have a whole series of missions and something called an ocean worlds initiative to go study these the first mission big mission in that initiative is called Europa Clipper it's going to a planet-sized satellite of Jupiter called Europa that not only has an ocean on the inside but geysers in which the ocean actually sprays out into space and we can sample it so and that mission is going to launch in 2025 or 2026 thank you yes Triton for my understanding is very similar to Pluto and I assume is easier to get to than someplace in the Kuiper belts why not go there next instead of going back to the Kuiper belts and what's next for New Horizons after Ultima Thule okay two very different questions so first of all for those who don't know Triton is a moon of Neptune that used to be a planet on its own orbiting out there and got captured into orbit as a satellite of Neptune and Voyager visited Triton and so we know a lot about it and it is a cousin of Pluto it's not as geologically active we would very much like to see a future mission to go back to Neptune and to study Triton and many other phenomenology there I can tell you just today NASA announced a whole series of studies for new missions in the solar system one of the missions that got funded and I'm on this team is a Pluto orbiter that's as of today I think I had 54 emails about this people are excited thank you and the woman scientist who runs that is named Carly Howett and then another mission was selected among these 10 studies to go back to Neptune and Triton and a woman named Abigail or Abby Romer is in charge of that one so we are working on getting those missions thank you next to last so you mentioned the small window you had to get to get like behind Pluto without hitting anything and everything going as well so were those calculations done before you left off or was those one of the ones that you did like while New Horizons was on its way there and like what kind of stuff did you do while it was on its way there yeah so those calculations were done before we ever launched they were part of the design process we had to know how accurately we'd have to navigate so we'd know what kind of navigation sensors to buy and we had to know what kind of computations we had to do in real time on the spacecraft how much fuel to have on board so that we could home in to the right timing and everything else so all that kind of stuff has to get worked out far in advance even before you can construct the spacecraft and that's one of the things I really like about the whole enterprise of what we do is you have to think really hard and have all these different technical specialties different types of engineers and scientists to get all this right because once you send it out there's no getting it back to change it improve it oops I forgot about that what was your second question so like what did you do while all the way yeah it's you know we're so we're 10 years right and people asked me and I all my colleagues on New Horizons we would get asked all the time like are you bored like what do you even do you work on New Horizons I hear the spacecrafts hibernating right and we're like working a million miles an hour every week of the year for nine years for comparison I told us in a class this morning to some students when Voyager flew across the solar system their team was 450 people our team was less than 50 people so you know some of that's modern technology we have laptops they didn't but but we were just very busy we just had a lot with the work of a 450 person team to do and so literally the entire journey across the solar system Alice Bowman who's my mission operations manager who's if you see napal 13 you know the Ed Harris character that runs mission control that's Alice except she doesn't have a crew cut and I mean she called this a nine-year sprint meaning we were busy the entire time making our plans checking them twice planning for different flybys if we found hazards we had to dodge getting all the malfunction procedures together doing all the crew training for the ground crew for what if this happens what if that happens there's a chapter in Chasing New Horizons called battle plan Pluto which tells the whole story of what it takes the inside story of what it takes to get ready for one of these one shot it's going to work or it's not going to work flybys if you only can read one chapter and you want to nerd out read that one okay you're welcome last question thank you so much for your talk this was really interesting thank you based on what you were asking us earlier my question is do you think Pluto is a dwarf planet or a planet I guess that's fair so there's a story behind this which is in 1991 right as I got my PhD I published the definition of a dwarf planet it's a small type of planet so those are not mutually exclusive dwarf planets are a type of planet and to planetary scientists that's always been the case with very rare exceptions I'm sure there's some small minority that has some other idea right and everything you know about this planet controversy comes from a misunderstanding where astronomers passed some resolution in a professional society meeting in 2006 right and got it very wrong and somehow the scientific press didn't look at that critically like they should have planetary scientists never use that definition in any research papers because it doesn't make any sense and it probably be about as bad a situation as if planetary scientists try to make categorizations of galaxies it's not our technical specialty we would get it wrong we might have our heart in the right place but we'd flub it up another example might be that you know if god forbid you should ever have a neurological problem you would want to go to a neurologist not some other type of doctor let's say a podiatrist you wouldn't go a foot doctor to have your head fixed don't go to an astronomer talk about planets in in planetary science the small planets the dwarf planets are considered planets you'll find that all through the published technical literature and if you go to a professional planetary science meeting like the division of planetary sciences or the american geophysical union or the geological society of america any of those meetings and just sit quietly in the audience during talks you'll hear those worlds call planets 100 of the time we don't know what else to call them so Pluto and the dwarf planets are planets and i'm not alone in this this is the way the professionals categorize but thank you for asking the question and with that i get to go to dinner so thank you all very much thank you Steve to everyone thank you so very much for your participation students as as a professor i just want you to know we we didn't bring alan here to set him up on a pedestal for you to marvel at we brought alan here to inspire you to drive you on to all the great future opportunities you have in your careers so thank you alan good night boil her up and help her do thank you