Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcomed up Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says ice and
Speaker 1: silence and dark skies as we go around another year.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bolcabon, I'm Joe McCormick. That
Speaker 1: kind of put me in a in a moody mood,
Speaker 1: melancholy mood. That song I don't normally talk about the
Speaker 1: lyrics I pick, but this, in this case I'm going to.
Speaker 1: That song is called I'm Your Moon. It's by Jonathan Colton,
Speaker 1: and it's about Pluto and Karen, and it's it's Karen
Speaker 1: singing to Pluto after Pluto has been downgraded from planet
Speaker 1: to dwarf planet, saying it's all right, I'm still here
Speaker 1: with you and we're revolving around each other. You know,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. When people get upset about Pluto not
Speaker 1: being a planet anymore, I'm like, what's wrong with being
Speaker 1: a dwarf planet. It's kind of insulting to Series and
Speaker 1: all these other dwarf planet that are pretty cool. Well,
Speaker 1: I think Colton's point was that the designation was almost
Speaker 1: created for Pluto and Thereford, that's when it's an insult.
Speaker 1: We're not calling you that anymore. We're calling you this
Speaker 1: new thing that you are, and and nothing else that
Speaker 1: we've classified yet is but the reason why we chose
Speaker 1: that lyric, or why I chose that lyric in the
Speaker 1: first place. Yeah, act like we have any say whenever
Speaker 1: I'm not hear you guys, pay lyrics. Um. But no,
Speaker 1: we we are going to cover new horizons the probe
Speaker 1: that has gone on this amazing mission to Pluto, the
Speaker 1: flyby of Pluto, and to talk about everything that went
Speaker 1: into making that mission possible, as well as the some
Speaker 1: of the science that we've learned so far, knowing that
Speaker 1: we've got so much more to learn from this mission,
Speaker 1: and it's really just a cool story. It's amazing that
Speaker 1: I grew up learning about Pluto as one of the
Speaker 1: planets in our Solar system in my science books, and
Speaker 1: I remember, you know, learning all the names of the
Speaker 1: planets and thinking about Pluto is just another one of them.
Speaker 1: But I think I didn't realize when I was a
Speaker 1: kid how we had never gotten a close look at Pluto.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, And I mean depending on when you
Speaker 1: were learning about it. I don't think that we had
Speaker 1: any concept about even what the atmosphere of the planet
Speaker 1: looked like until yea, So when I was a kid
Speaker 1: going to school, we didn't know anything about Pluto's atmosphere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were there. They were just making it up. They
Speaker 1: were just like, hey, so there's this planet called Pluto
Speaker 1: out there. Yeah it's and you know it's it's it's
Speaker 1: probably I see, pretty young in our our scientific knowledge,
Speaker 1: Like if you look at that, you know when we
Speaker 1: learned of these different planets. The discovery of Pluto dates
Speaker 1: back to nineteen thirty who discovered by Clyde Townbo who
Speaker 1: named you know, was able to discover this planet, which
Speaker 1: got him a great deal of fame in astronaut Uncle Circles,
Speaker 1: who was Clyde uh clients. It was an interesting guy,
Speaker 1: very eccentric, astronomer, very he loved puns. So I think
Speaker 1: I would have gotten along with Clyde really well a
Speaker 1: guy non eccentric astronomers. Is that a subcategory of the field.
Speaker 1: There could be some who are just very you know,
Speaker 1: very middle of the road kind of astronomers. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think of astronomers as being dreamers, so I often
Speaker 1: think of them as being eccentric. I'm sure you have
Speaker 1: your astronomical accountants, the people who their favorite part of
Speaker 1: the job is logging the coordinance of the new object,
Speaker 1: creating new spreadsheet mechanisms to to sort the data, naming
Speaker 1: those objects on nonsequential series of like the CR one
Speaker 1: oh five nine point a R four so droll so
Speaker 1: uh tumbo discovered Pluto, but later on we would discover
Speaker 1: much more about this that it has five moons that
Speaker 1: we know of. There may be more, the largest of
Speaker 1: which is Karen, which is more than half the size
Speaker 1: of Pluto if you're going by diameter. There's also sticks, Nicks, cabarros,
Speaker 1: and Hydra. We've got a lot of Hellish names going
Speaker 1: on here. The idea being that when you come out
Speaker 1: from interstellar space and you start entering into the Solar System,
Speaker 1: you first passed through the Alter realm, the hellish Alter
Speaker 1: got to go through Hell to get to us kind
Speaker 1: of or you know, it's the icy mouth of Satan
Speaker 1: out there. To be fair, the the idea of the
Speaker 1: underworld and the and the the area beyond life in
Speaker 1: Greek mythology doesn't have quite the same connotations, not necessarily
Speaker 1: a place of punishment for it, but we do get
Speaker 1: these like sort of like negative afterlife kind of feelings.
Speaker 1: Which Pluto, he's the god of the dead, right and
Speaker 1: and you know if a lot of very popular depictions
Speaker 1: of that character cast that cast him in a villainous
Speaker 1: or or malevolent light. Yeah, was he in the Disney Hercules.
Speaker 1: Was the Hades with the fire hair? Yeah, played by
Speaker 1: James Would Yeah, thank you, but definitely the equivalent to Pluto. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so you got Pluto, you got you got sticks. That's
Speaker 1: the river you have to cross to get to the underworld.
Speaker 1: Also an amazing arena band. Right there you go. And
Speaker 1: then Karen is the fairy operator who gets you across
Speaker 1: the right. Yeah, who you? You have the coins that
Speaker 1: you have to have so that he will fare you across. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know quite about the other ones. Care bros.
Speaker 1: That's uh, I don't know, okay, Well, hydra Hydra's the
Speaker 1: multi headed Oh yeah, yeah, I know that one, all right,
Speaker 1: you know that one? Hale hydra ra Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you guys are talking. Cares that's
Speaker 1: the Greek pronunciation for We often will get a soft
Speaker 1: Sea Serberus, the three headed dog. Okay, so um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh. And by the way, I have a friend
Speaker 1: from high school who is uh, very knowledgeable in Greek mythology,
Speaker 1: and if he's listening to this episode, I do apologize
Speaker 1: for butchering the pronunciation of all these names, because I
Speaker 1: know I am, But these were discovered later on, and
Speaker 1: this was really the New Horizons mission was our really
Speaker 1: our first chance to get a close look at these
Speaker 1: various bodies. Before we had had a lot of pretty
Speaker 1: blurry images from various telescopes. Oh yeah, if you googled
Speaker 1: images of Pluto just a couple of months ago, you
Speaker 1: would get artists illustrations, but then you'd also get a
Speaker 1: photograph from the Hubble telescope that was basically a disc
Speaker 1: of yellow and black blurs. Yeah, it's it's funny because
Speaker 1: NASA has actually released a series of photos that have
Speaker 1: been taken over time of Pluto, so you can actually
Speaker 1: see our view of Pluto. Yeah, it's really impressive. But
Speaker 1: before we get into the actual mission, I thought i'd
Speaker 1: talk a little bit just kind of a quick overview
Speaker 1: of the history of planetary exploration using probes, because it
Speaker 1: kind of tells you, you know, how how difficult this
Speaker 1: problem was and why it's been so why it took
Speaker 1: so long for us to get a close look at Pluto. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also just to put in real quick, because we forgot
Speaker 1: one of these moons. Nicks is the goddess of the night.
Speaker 1: I didn't mention Nick, thank you very much. Similar I
Speaker 1: think they're related. So I think it's one of those
Speaker 1: weird Zeus things and Nicks. It's awesome. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to put in, don't don't want to forget anybody out there.
Speaker 1: I just like that. We've got a real rock in
Speaker 1: episode so far. Alright, So alright, No, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to go down that route. So the first successful UH mission,
Speaker 1: a fly by mission using a probe would be back
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty two with the Mariner Too. That went
Speaker 1: by Venus because the first time we sent a probe
Speaker 1: on a fly by mission of another planet, and it
Speaker 1: was the first mission to perform a successful fly by.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't our first try as a as a
Speaker 1: you know, as humanity's first try wasn't the first one.
Speaker 1: The first try was with the Soviet Union in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one with the Sputnik seven probe that was meant
Speaker 1: to land on Venus, but it never escaped Earth orbits.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well, and this story happens over and over
Speaker 1: for both the Soviets and for the United States. I mean,
Speaker 1: this was this was during the Space race, right, No,
Speaker 1: I'm not making fun. Yeah, sad trombone noises that would
Speaker 1: go along with the rest of this this section here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and other attempts that would follow spot Nick seven
Speaker 1: but we're also unsuccessful, were the Venera one and the
Speaker 1: Mariner one and the spot Nick nineteen pro uh. And
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be until Mariner two that we actually got
Speaker 1: a good look at Venus. Next came Mars actually, so
Speaker 1: we didn't go to Mercury. Next, we went to Mars.
Speaker 1: And that was the Mariner four as the first successful
Speaker 1: fly by probe. That was in nineteen sixty four, and
Speaker 1: I believe it was on July four of nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: which happens to be the same date that we achieved
Speaker 1: this Pluto fly by. Cool, that's an interesting coincidence. Other
Speaker 1: attempts to get to Mars included Mariner three, spot Next
Speaker 1: twenty two and twenty four, and the Mars one and
Speaker 1: Mars Nick one and two probes. Actually those two had
Speaker 1: been launched back in nineteen sixty, so if Mars Nick
Speaker 1: one and two had been successful, they would have actually
Speaker 1: preceded the Venus fly by, but they were not successful.
Speaker 1: Then we checked out Mercury in nineteen seventy three with
Speaker 1: the Mariner four. Voyager one and two flew by Jupiter
Speaker 1: and Saturn. In nineteen seventy seven, Voyager two would also
Speaker 1: go by Uranus and Neptune. So we had looks at
Speaker 1: all the other planets, but Pluto remained so far out there, uh,
Speaker 1: that we had not had a chance to check it out.
Speaker 1: And so we launched the New Horizons probe way back
Speaker 1: in two thousand six. So it took more than eight
Speaker 1: years for it to go from Earth to Pluto. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because it almost didn't happen. We almost
Speaker 1: didn't have a New Horizons project, and if it had
Speaker 1: not happened when it did, we would have had a
Speaker 1: really long wait ahead of us to give it another go.
Speaker 1: So NASA had been debating on a Pluto mission for decades,
Speaker 1: and one of the proposed missions was called the Pluto
Speaker 1: Kuiper Express. Back in two thousand Kuiper referring to the
Speaker 1: Kuiper Belt, which is sort of like the asteroid belt
Speaker 1: between Mars and Jupiter, but much bigger and on the
Speaker 1: very outskirts of our solar systems, way way out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: lots of frozen not just water, ice, but methane and
Speaker 1: other hydrocarb and uh So, the budget for this proposed
Speaker 1: mission just kept growing as time went on. Things were
Speaker 1: getting tagged on. This was during a pretty rough period
Speaker 1: during NASA's history. Yeah, this was during a lot of
Speaker 1: the Space Shuttle trouble and stuff like that. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: budget cuts they were they were facing big budget cuts,
Speaker 1: and there were budget plans that were proposed that didn't
Speaker 1: have money set aside specifically for missions like this, which
Speaker 1: also caused a problem. But eventually NASA ended up canceling
Speaker 1: this project when it just got too complicated and too expensive,
Speaker 1: and that prompted the NASA Associate Administrator Ed Wiler to
Speaker 1: say that the plans to visit Pluto were officially dead
Speaker 1: for the foreseeable future. And here is why. So, Pluto's
Speaker 1: got a really enormous orbit, right gigantic, Yeah, and not
Speaker 1: exactly as close to circular as many of the other orbits, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of dips in and out. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of what we might call an ex and trick orbit.
Speaker 1: And if NASA didn't get a spacecraft on the way
Speaker 1: to Pluto within a few years of two thousand, while
Speaker 1: it was as most interesting, we would miss that opportunity.
Speaker 1: Well most interesting. Aren't planets always kind of interesting? Well,
Speaker 1: they're always kind of interesting, but some can be more
Speaker 1: interesting than others, and some can be more interesting at
Speaker 1: one time of the year than another. For example, when
Speaker 1: Pluto is closer to the Sun, its atmosphere is gaseous,
Speaker 1: or so we suspected, So we suspected. But when it
Speaker 1: moves further out, scientists were worried that the temperature of
Speaker 1: the planet would become so cold that the atmosphere itself
Speaker 1: would freeze and fall to the ground. So you imagine,
Speaker 1: like if you've ever seen any of those cartoons or
Speaker 1: anything where someone says something and their words freeze in
Speaker 1: the air, and then it's kind of like that, but
Speaker 1: for real, z's that. I feel like I have felt
Speaker 1: cold before. I don't think I think I need to redefine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking like, you know, seriously cold here
Speaker 1: where where things that would be in gas form here
Speaker 1: on Earth would be would be solid there on Pluto.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to be able to look at Pluto
Speaker 1: when it's atmosphere would still be an atmospheric form, but
Speaker 1: because of that enormous orbit, we would only have a
Speaker 1: certain operation, a certain window of opportunity. Um Pluto takes
Speaker 1: two hundred forty seven point six eight earth years to
Speaker 1: go around the Sun once, and if we missed that
Speaker 1: point where that that range where the atmosphere would remain
Speaker 1: in gas form as far as we could tell, then
Speaker 1: we'd have more than two centuries to wait to try
Speaker 1: it again. And that that's that's that's a really long
Speaker 1: term budget plan, even for NASA exactly right, And then
Speaker 1: they'd be like, well, why bother planning anything, because by
Speaker 1: the time we'd get around to launch all, all the
Speaker 1: technology is going to be different anyway. So it was
Speaker 1: very disheartening to those who wanted to look at Pluto
Speaker 1: back in two thousand when this mission was canceled. So
Speaker 1: in order to get to Pluto in time to check
Speaker 1: out this atmosphere, they had one other chance, which was
Speaker 1: to use one of the other planets in our Solar
Speaker 1: system as kind of a boost. Right, This is the
Speaker 1: Jupiter Gravity Assist, and New Horizons is not the only
Speaker 1: spacecraft that has used this. We We've talked about this
Speaker 1: a bunch on the show. It's it's basically, when you
Speaker 1: get a probe or or spacecraft near the orbit of
Speaker 1: something big enough to kind of uh, let it be
Speaker 1: captured by the planet and then keep going. So so
Speaker 1: it like it like gets this forward boost by by
Speaker 1: temporarily kind of kind of riding in the slip stream
Speaker 1: of the planet almost and then like like that skateboard
Speaker 1: and back to the future. That's exactly what I was
Speaker 1: gonna say. It's like when Marty gets on the back
Speaker 1: of the truck and uses the truck to accelerate on
Speaker 1: the skateboard much faster than his little toe push could
Speaker 1: ever get him. Right. Yeah, So the the you might think, well,
Speaker 1: if we have Jupiter there, then what's the big worry?
Speaker 1: We can just use jubiter Well, Jupiter orbits too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and Jupiter's orbit and Pluto's orbit, aren't you know,
Speaker 1: it's not like they're always in alignment, so you only
Speaker 1: have the amount of time where you can still correct
Speaker 1: for the trajectory you're going to get with the gravity
Speaker 1: assist so that you're still heading in the right direction
Speaker 1: so that you ultimately pass by Pluto. Uh. And the
Speaker 1: scientists had figured out that they needed to have this
Speaker 1: uh they need to have a launch before really January
Speaker 1: two thousand six or right around there in order to
Speaker 1: take advantage of this. Now it turns out that they
Speaker 1: actually got there a little later than that because the
Speaker 1: calculations weren't uh like like they they had kind of
Speaker 1: been conservative by saying, if we don't get there by
Speaker 1: January two thou six, we don't get there at all,
Speaker 1: or if we don't launch by January two thousand six,
Speaker 1: there's no point in doing it. But uh, the point
Speaker 1: was that they needed to launch from Earth because it
Speaker 1: was going to take time to go from Earth to
Speaker 1: Jupiter and then even more time obviously to go from
Speaker 1: Jupiter to Pluto. So they used this new idea. They
Speaker 1: kind of started pitching this around and there was a
Speaker 1: new group formed in NASA to design a mission that
Speaker 1: would become New Horizons, and they estimated the cost would
Speaker 1: be five hundred million dollars, which would include the rocket
Speaker 1: needed to launch the spacecraft, so not just that the
Speaker 1: spacecraft cost five million, they're saying the whole thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: considering how we taught so many times about how expensive
Speaker 1: getting stuff into spaces, Uh, it's actually pretty pretty uh decent,
Speaker 1: you know, as far as space missions are concerned. Um.
Speaker 1: So they proposed this in two thousand one. There was
Speaker 1: a competitive mission pitch process where NASA was entertaining mission
Speaker 1: pitches from various parts of the organization, and as administration said,
Speaker 1: all right, let's fund this one. Let's see if we
Speaker 1: can make it happen. Uh. So the funding came from
Speaker 1: earmarks and budgets placed by members of Congress because the
Speaker 1: president his budget plan did not cover anything that would
Speaker 1: go to this kind of mission. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: it took an Act of Congress in order to carve
Speaker 1: out parts of NASA's budget to allow this to happen.
Speaker 1: So New Horizons gets the funding it needs from this
Speaker 1: Act of Congress. But there still were some other issues
Speaker 1: before it got to the point where I was doing
Speaker 1: a fly by of Pluto. Well, yeah, I know, it's
Speaker 1: had some onboard computer problems. Yeah, Um, just after the
Speaker 1: gravitational assist from Jupiter, it had a computer issue that
Speaker 1: wasn't even the one I was talking about you were
Speaker 1: thinking of the one that was almost that was just
Speaker 1: before It's fly by. No, they had so cosmic race.
Speaker 1: We've talked about these before on the podcast. Sure, high
Speaker 1: energy particles flying through space. Uh, so they can cause
Speaker 1: computer glitches since see it ends up being like a
Speaker 1: control all delete thing. It's not like it's it destroys
Speaker 1: the computer, but it doesn't necessitate a reboot. Um. So,
Speaker 1: there were cosmic rays that interfered with the computer, and
Speaker 1: at first the team had anticipated that it would only
Speaker 1: happen once in New Horizons mission. They thought that the
Speaker 1: cosmic rays were infrequent enough and the space is huge
Speaker 1: that the odds were that New Horizons might encounter one.
Speaker 1: They get, they kind of factored that in. It turned
Speaker 1: out that it encountered several more on its way to Pluto,
Speaker 1: and it was fine, it would reboot, everything was okay,
Speaker 1: So no permanent damage was caused, but it did teach
Speaker 1: scientists something interesting like, Wow, there's a little bit more
Speaker 1: of a chance of running into cosmic radiation than we
Speaker 1: had first anticipated. Yeah, what more of that activity? Uh?
Speaker 1: And that can control delete kind of thing was also
Speaker 1: what wound up happening in the more recent computer shutdown. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was very scary because we were right about to
Speaker 1: reach Pluto. Yeah, we were like ten days out. Yes, Specifically,
Speaker 1: what was happening was that the computer aboard the New
Speaker 1: Horizons was being asked to do two things at once,
Speaker 1: and it was the combination of the two what gave
Speaker 1: it Cartesian doubt. It had too much, It required too
Speaker 1: much computational power. It could not do both of them
Speaker 1: at once. So instead of trying to do both of
Speaker 1: them ones and possibly damaging itself in the process, it
Speaker 1: shut down, went to its backup computer, and so for
Speaker 1: a while we found home. Found home to say like, hey,
Speaker 1: hell yeah, exactly what to do about this one? My
Speaker 1: main brain shut down? Can you guys look into that?
Speaker 1: And so you know, obviously it takes a long time
Speaker 1: for information to get between the spacecraft and us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for four and a half hours was the time difference
Speaker 1: at like like right then on that day. So that's
Speaker 1: you know, a significant delay between getting a message out
Speaker 1: and being able to reply. Then you have to wait
Speaker 1: another four and a half hours for the reply to
Speaker 1: go out, and then you have to wait another four
Speaker 1: and a half hours to see if it worked. But
Speaker 1: everything worked out fine. The engineers on the ground said,
Speaker 1: you know, this is exactly what the computer was supposed
Speaker 1: to do. If this sort of thing happened, we know
Speaker 1: how to fix it. Uh. There were some reports that
Speaker 1: would say in the media that made it seem like
Speaker 1: the mission itself was in jeopardy. But all the engineers
Speaker 1: I was reading about, they were like, no, I mean
Speaker 1: this was you know it. It obviously caused concern because
Speaker 1: of the timing. Oh yeah, yeah. But and and for
Speaker 1: that minute when you know, they got the like help
Speaker 1: message at first, you know, before they could check back
Speaker 1: in with the computer, there was that moment of them
Speaker 1: going like, oh, well, is this another computer shutdown or
Speaker 1: did an asteroid destroy our spacecraft? And no one had
Speaker 1: any idea for like another four and a half to
Speaker 1: nine hours. There was always the chance that there could
Speaker 1: be a collision, and that would have been the end
Speaker 1: of New Horizons. Yeah. Of the four d and nineties
Speaker 1: six planned observations, the shut down prevented thirty of them
Speaker 1: from happening. Uh so so six percent, which which sounds
Speaker 1: like a kind of large number until you kind of wait,
Speaker 1: the importance of the observations by how close you actually
Speaker 1: are to the planet, and this was still so far out,
Speaker 1: or relatively so far out, that it didn't do any
Speaker 1: uh irreparable harm that there were most of the stuff
Speaker 1: I saw was like, it caused thirty of our observations
Speaker 1: to not happen, but they were thirty of the boring ones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I hadn't crossed over into the underworld yet. No. No,
Speaker 1: it caused a few of our staff members to sleep
Speaker 1: on the floor of the apl that night. But so
Speaker 1: I thought we could talk a little bit about some
Speaker 1: of the instruments that are on the new horizons. These
Speaker 1: are the things that are gathering the information, and they
Speaker 1: were purposefully made fairly simple. They decided not to go
Speaker 1: super elaborate and and load this thing down with you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred instruments. There are only seven aboard the spacecraft
Speaker 1: UM and they have great names. Are they also named
Speaker 1: after demonic entities from the underworld? Yes, Ralph, demonic entity
Speaker 1: from the underworld, is the first one quake in fear
Speaker 1: upon the approach of Ralph. Ralph maybe what you do
Speaker 1: in the underworld, if you're at a certain level of
Speaker 1: the world that I recall lots of Ralph ing in
Speaker 1: one of the levels of Dante's inferno. Uh No RALPH
Speaker 1: is a visible and infrared imager and spectrometer, and it
Speaker 1: is able to create thermal maps of surfaces and provide
Speaker 1: color and composition. Uh you know enhancements to images. So
Speaker 1: a lot of the pictures that we see, by the
Speaker 1: time we see them, they've gone through a couple of
Speaker 1: different layers of enhancements so that we can really make
Speaker 1: sense of what we're seeing. It's not the what the
Speaker 1: raw data would normally represent. Then you have ALICE, which
Speaker 1: is an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, and that's used to examine
Speaker 1: the composition of Pluto's atmosphere and can also search for
Speaker 1: an atmosphere around other bodies like Karen Kuiper Belt objects
Speaker 1: or k b o s. Then you have REX, the
Speaker 1: Radio Science Experiment. So why isn't it our sex Now
Speaker 1: I know it's so Radio Science Experiment or REX, which
Speaker 1: measures atmospheric composition and temperature. It's a radiometer. Then you
Speaker 1: have LORI l O r r I, the Long Range
Speaker 1: Reconnaissance Imager, which is a camera with a really amazing
Speaker 1: telescopic lens um and that is what has been used
Speaker 1: to take pictures of Pluto's far side, the side that's
Speaker 1: facing away from us, and it also provides high res images.
Speaker 1: Then you have SWAP the solar wind around Pluto. It's
Speaker 1: a spectrometer that analyzes solar wind and plasma and it
Speaker 1: can also measure the escape rate of Pluto's atmosphere. We'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about Pluto's atmosphere in the second
Speaker 1: because that's really cool. Uh, pepsi, you can't do that,
Speaker 1: but pepsi. Yeah, no trademark. So Pluta after the ancient
Speaker 1: Scandinavian goddess of refreshing beverage carbonation out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Yeah, again,
Speaker 1: no Pluto. Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation. That's what stands for.
Speaker 1: It's an energetic particle spectrometer which measures the composition and
Speaker 1: density of plasma escaping Pluto's atmosphere. So similar to SWAP
Speaker 1: in that way. And then you have the s d C.
Speaker 1: The Student dust counter doesn't count student dust. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: that was designed by students to kill. Yeah, so students
Speaker 1: designed this instrument and it measures the space dust that
Speaker 1: new horizons encounters throughout its voyage. So kind of cool
Speaker 1: and uh, so far it's found tons of science. Ye,
Speaker 1: surprising things too, things we didn't expect to find. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: The surface color data that we've started getting back indicates
Speaker 1: that there are three zones on Pluto, a kind of
Speaker 1: kind of arc zone around the equator, then then mid
Speaker 1: colored zones around the mid latitudes, and uh, I see
Speaker 1: looking zones in the polar regions, which the New Horizons
Speaker 1: team is is guessing is the result of seasonal ice
Speaker 1: transport from the equator to the poles. By ice transport,
Speaker 1: we don't necessarily mean like trucks taking ice. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not counting anything out. Yes, you're here.
Speaker 1: You know. I've seen a lot of talk about the
Speaker 1: methane forming glaciers and glacial activity. Yeah, the the methane
Speaker 1: and nitrogen and carbon monoxide are forming glaciers because it
Speaker 1: is like negative degrees fahrenheit. Very jilly out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: super interesting. Also, there's that heart of Pluto regiat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's one of the big surface features everybody's been
Speaker 1: noticing and right and drawing cartoons about. Yeah. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the vaguely heart shaped I've also seen several memes
Speaker 1: of the image of Pluto. The cartoon dog superimposed on
Speaker 1: top of this particular region, because because from one angle
Speaker 1: it looks like a you're looking at Pluto in profile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's also the Pluto surface whale. I've also seen. It
Speaker 1: suggested that since there is you know, no correct way
Speaker 1: up in space that that we are looking at, that
Speaker 1: took us of Pluto, oddly enough, not the dark side
Speaker 1: of Pluto. This lighter colored region appears to be a
Speaker 1: concentration of carbon monoxide ice but yeah, and intensifies towards
Speaker 1: the center of that frozen area. So the concentration of
Speaker 1: carbon monoxide grows as you get towards the center of
Speaker 1: this mass. But of course, the most scientifically remarkable thing
Speaker 1: about it is not that it is heart shaped, but
Speaker 1: that it is so smooth. I mean, isn't it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the odd things is that you would expect
Speaker 1: there to be a lot more invitations and craters exactly
Speaker 1: because you would expect, you know, Pluto was actually kind
Speaker 1: of blasted by other materials, but so we expected to
Speaker 1: see lots of pits and craters on the surface like
Speaker 1: you do in the moon. And when you don't see that,
Speaker 1: then you start have to ask yourself why isn't it
Speaker 1: like that, then what is going on? That means that
Speaker 1: why don't we have these craters and pits? Right, So
Speaker 1: it's typically been suggested, well, if we're looking at a
Speaker 1: smooth region on Pluto, that must mean that this region,
Speaker 1: for some reason, is geologically younger than we would expect
Speaker 1: any part of the surface of Pluto to be. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, the estimations are that the surface has been
Speaker 1: geologically active within the last one hundred million years. There's
Speaker 1: nothing on a geological scale for a plan it's been
Speaker 1: around for four billion years. In fact, I saw a
Speaker 1: report from Science magazine that said that the New Horizons
Speaker 1: team member John Spencer suggested it might even still be
Speaker 1: active today, which is pretty interesting that. That's also where
Speaker 1: I think I've seen some of them mentioned about glacial activity. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so we've got this one region that's informally called
Speaker 1: the Tombo Region. Within that Tambo region, there is a
Speaker 1: specific area of of ancient crater terrain where some of
Speaker 1: the craters have been filled in by very much younger ice.
Speaker 1: And they're calling this the Cthulhu Reggio because they hate
Speaker 1: us and our ability to sleep. Yeah, yeah, fathogen uh yeah,
Speaker 1: And so much, so, so much stuff about this is
Speaker 1: surprising to us. Getting back into the glaciers that we
Speaker 1: talked about, we mentioned that before, with the carbon monoxide ice,
Speaker 1: the nitrogen ice, the methane ice. Uh, that's amazing, and
Speaker 1: that we don't we don't really understand how all of
Speaker 1: these different land masses came about, right, you know they
Speaker 1: that's a large mystery to us too. So there are
Speaker 1: a couple of different hypotheses that we have about the
Speaker 1: various cracks and troughs that are on the surface of
Speaker 1: Pluto and how they might have formed. One is that
Speaker 1: maybe it was through contraction of the surface, which is
Speaker 1: like when you have a muddy area and then the
Speaker 1: sun comes out and it dries. You see those cracks
Speaker 1: form as the as the mud solidifies into dirt. Sure, okay,
Speaker 1: So so maybe the orbit of Pluto taking it back
Speaker 1: into the closer to the sun and letting some of
Speaker 1: these carbon monoxide glaciers melt. Possibly. Uh. The other possible
Speaker 1: on another hypothesis is convection, in which Pluto's interior would
Speaker 1: warm the frozen carbon monoxide. Uh. But that that of
Speaker 1: course raises questions all on its own, right, like how
Speaker 1: would that happen. One of the big lingering questions that's
Speaker 1: left by the new discoveries about Pluto is if we
Speaker 1: assume that these surface features are explained by heat coming
Speaker 1: from the interior of Pluto, so geologic act ativity, uh,
Speaker 1: convection warming coming from the center of planet. Where does
Speaker 1: that heat come from? Because we wouldn't expect it to
Speaker 1: be there. I think it's love. Uh yeah, these are
Speaker 1: these are the This is why the scientists absolutely have
Speaker 1: been bubbling over with excitement, because it's when you discover
Speaker 1: stuff and you don't know the answer to the question
Speaker 1: that really gets people like their imagination going, and they
Speaker 1: have to start coming up with ideas and then finding
Speaker 1: ways they might be able to test that. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: I've read a few just proposed hypotheses. I mean, nobody
Speaker 1: knows the answer yet. But one of the ideas is
Speaker 1: that Pluto and its moon Karen were actually formed at
Speaker 1: a much more recent impact event than was previously thought.
Speaker 1: You know, the ideas that they formed a long time
Speaker 1: ago when things were smashing together in the early Solar System.
Speaker 1: You could explain them having more heat inside if they
Speaker 1: had formed much more recently than we expected. Another explanation
Speaker 1: would be if they are compounds present on Pluto and
Speaker 1: Karen with lower melting points than we would expect, or
Speaker 1: you could maybe explain it in terms of tidal forces.
Speaker 1: But I think it's cool that we don't know the
Speaker 1: answer to this yet. Yeah, No, that's it's it's great
Speaker 1: in the sense that it gives us goals, right like,
Speaker 1: now we know these observations, Now we have to explain
Speaker 1: what caused the stuff we observed. So pretty awesome. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are other some some other features on Pluto that
Speaker 1: we should talk about. There's some dark streaks across the
Speaker 1: plains of Pluto that suggests that wind could have been
Speaker 1: blowing material across the frozen service. Also, the mountains on
Speaker 1: Pluto seem to be about a hundred million years old
Speaker 1: or younger, similar to some of the other features we
Speaker 1: were talking about mountain building again as evidence of geologic activity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and because of that lack of craters again, that tells us,
Speaker 1: you know, generally, how old they must be, because if
Speaker 1: they were older, we would expect to see a lot
Speaker 1: more craters on them. Um. And normally we would say
Speaker 1: that a planet's a planet's mountains would be formed by
Speaker 1: some gravitational interaction between other plants that would generate the
Speaker 1: heat that would lead to major geological activity. But we
Speaker 1: have to kind of discount that for Pluto. It's too
Speaker 1: far out there for the that to be a factor.
Speaker 1: So it's not like the thing. The forces that we
Speaker 1: understand that act upon other bodies don't necessarily pertain to Pluto.
Speaker 1: It's too small and too far away for that gravitational
Speaker 1: interaction to generate the heat necessary at least as far
Speaker 1: as we understand. And maybe that there's something going on
Speaker 1: that we had not factored in, and then we have
Speaker 1: to revise our ideas of what is possible, which is
Speaker 1: also super exciting. Then we can talk about Pluto's atmosphere,
Speaker 1: the which was largely a mystery to us. You know,
Speaker 1: this was the whole reason why we wanted to go
Speaker 1: when we went, because we wanted to make sure we
Speaker 1: could observe it while it was still an atmosphere form
Speaker 1: and not just chunks of ice on the ground. Um So,
Speaker 1: Pluto's atmosphere has been observed as far out as one
Speaker 1: thousand miles or six hundred kilometers from its surface, which
Speaker 1: was much further out than previous observations which were around
Speaker 1: a hundred seventy miles or two seventy kilometers, and it
Speaker 1: also contains a haze. There's this there's this great image
Speaker 1: of Pluto from the far side of Pluto where new
Speaker 1: Horizons has already gone past the planet, taking pictures back
Speaker 1: from the way it came right right with sunlight kind
Speaker 1: of filtering through. Yeah, the atmosphere. It looks like it's
Speaker 1: the actually filtering. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was gonna say
Speaker 1: it looks like the cover of the ring from the
Speaker 1: well where you get that ring of light. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this haze that's around the planet. And and that
Speaker 1: haze is really interesting, and it's actually a couple of
Speaker 1: different complex hydrocarbons like ethylene and acetylene, and those are
Speaker 1: byproducts that's what remains from methane after it's been broken
Speaker 1: down by a ultraviolet light. So so in the upper
Speaker 1: atmosphere of Pluto, you've got the solar radiation interacting the
Speaker 1: atmosphere and smashing up those methane molecules and and kind
Speaker 1: of dribbling this beautiful haze down onto the surface. Exactly.
Speaker 1: It falls through the atmosphere of Pluto and condenses on
Speaker 1: the way down, and that's where we're getting this this haze.
Speaker 1: I think I read that's where Pluto's red color comes from,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Yeah, it turns into this reddish brown goop.
Speaker 1: And so being a scientific term, yes, goop goo, whatever
Speaker 1: you want, gunk. I mean, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different words I could use, um, But at any rate,
Speaker 1: the hypothesis is, in fact, this is what gives Pluto
Speaker 1: that color. It may just be a one contributing factor
Speaker 1: to that. Actually, you know, we can't can't definitively say
Speaker 1: that that's the main reason or the only reason for
Speaker 1: the reddish coloration, but it seems to be contributing to it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then scientists have been observing some fluctuations in Pluto's
Speaker 1: atmosphere that changes in the atmospheric pressure. Actually, there were
Speaker 1: earlier observations that were made where the pressure was at
Speaker 1: one level, but as new horizons went by, it was
Speaker 1: much much less. And scientists believe that in fact, we
Speaker 1: are observing Pluto while it's undergoing a global change in atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Pluto right now
Speaker 1: is just one one of Earth's surface pressure. And they
Speaker 1: measured this by sending radio waves to Pluto as as
Speaker 1: the probe was passing directly behind it and therefore measuring
Speaker 1: the distortion of those radio waves through the atmosphere, along
Speaker 1: getting those really beautiful pictures of the sun filtering through.
Speaker 1: So super interesting, like it may be that this was
Speaker 1: just incredibly fortuitous that we are actually looking at this
Speaker 1: planet in a moment of transformation, and who knows what
Speaker 1: if this had not worked out and we had not
Speaker 1: been able to send the probe at this time and
Speaker 1: we had to wait another couple of centuries, the people
Speaker 1: that then would look at Pluto would see something fundamentally
Speaker 1: different and not necessarily even know that it's a different,
Speaker 1: different condition than what we would have observed, if you know,
Speaker 1: with new horizons, which is kind of kind of mind
Speaker 1: blowing really because this is stuff that happens over millennia,
Speaker 1: so so to see something in that much flux is
Speaker 1: pretty phenomenal. Yeah, of course, lucky for us. One of
Speaker 1: the coolest features of Pluto that we've observed so far
Speaker 1: is the direct evidence of the erosion of Pluto's atmosphere.
Speaker 1: So Pluto has a tail, which anyone who knows Disney
Speaker 1: is not surprised by. Uh, it's on every single one
Speaker 1: of the cartoons. Go pun yourself until you're ashamed. So Pluto,
Speaker 1: Pluto does have an atmospheric tail, so that the soft
Speaker 1: the solar wind that that radiation, uh, it impacts the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Pluto does not have super strong gravity. That atmosphere is
Speaker 1: getting stripped away and uh on the back side of
Speaker 1: the planet. You can sort of think of it. Imagine
Speaker 1: that you've got water that's hitting a round rock and
Speaker 1: you'd see the water kind of move around that rock
Speaker 1: and then rejoin on the other side. That rejoining part.
Speaker 1: Think of that as like the tail that's being pulled
Speaker 1: away from Pluto. That's where the solar wind has gone
Speaker 1: around Pluto and and started to strip this atmosphere away. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's why you have the various instruments aboard the new
Speaker 1: horizons to look for plasma and you know, indications of
Speaker 1: solar wind and also measure this this rate of the
Speaker 1: atmosphere being stripped from the planet. And it's pretty interesting. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: we're seeing some new pictures of Karen Nix and Hydra.
Speaker 1: The photo of Nicks shows like if you see the
Speaker 1: pictures of it, it's kind of this weird pink kind
Speaker 1: of like a j yeah, jelly beanish, Yeah, reddish, pinkish,
Speaker 1: kind of hue. Uh. But NASA does point out the
Speaker 1: color of those photos has been enhanced, and NIX looks
Speaker 1: exactly like it came out of the sequence where the
Speaker 1: Millennium falcon is going through the asteroid belt in the
Speaker 1: Empire Um. It looks like an asteroid from Star Wars,
Speaker 1: and Hydra itself may actually be covered in water ice,
Speaker 1: which is kind of exciting. Yeah, and yeah, we still
Speaker 1: have lots of things to to ask ourselves, like where
Speaker 1: is the heat coming from on Pluto? Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's kind of cool. Yeah. In addition to the other
Speaker 1: hypotheses I mentioned earlier, I was again reading about this
Speaker 1: in this science magazine. So radioactive elements inside planets can
Speaker 1: of course explain heat coming up geologically, but that's thought
Speaker 1: not to be the case for Pluto and especially Karen,
Speaker 1: just because they're so small that they would have radioactive
Speaker 1: it did out already, if that's how you, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: had it all, I guess. So essentially their batteries would
Speaker 1: be drained by this point. Yeah, right, So of course
Speaker 1: it turns out that they're much younger than we we
Speaker 1: originally thought maybe that's the explanation. Yeah, it could be
Speaker 1: that's why we're looking so yeah, really interesting there. Um.
Speaker 1: One other thing to mention is the fact that we
Speaker 1: don't have all the information because New Horizons is still
Speaker 1: sending it to us. Yeah, and there's really quite a
Speaker 1: lot of it. We're going to spend the next several months,
Speaker 1: I think, receiving nitty gritty little bits of geological data.
Speaker 1: They kind of sent all of the big interest interesting
Speaker 1: photos out first to be like, hey, look at the
Speaker 1: shiny thing and be excited about it. And then it's
Speaker 1: going to be plodding through logs and logs and logs
Speaker 1: of data for a while, and it's not getting to
Speaker 1: us quickly for two very good reasons. So first of all,
Speaker 1: we probably won't be seeing the last of the Pluto
Speaker 1: data until maybe Scember. That'll be when we by then
Speaker 1: we should have received the last of it. Man speed
Speaker 1: of light, so slow at speed of light. And it's
Speaker 1: also the fact that they're using the equivalent of like
Speaker 1: a bond modem on the New Horizons, which is actually true.
Speaker 1: They they are, um, they're using a transmitter that has
Speaker 1: a throughput up between six hundred to twelve hundred bits
Speaker 1: per second. So if you're sending something of significant size,
Speaker 1: it's gonna take some time to get to Earth. Not
Speaker 1: just because of the distances involved, because yes, as we've
Speaker 1: said said, even light's going to be traveling, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: at a top speed where it's going to take hours
Speaker 1: to get back to Earth, but also because of the throughput.
Speaker 1: If a file is of a significant size, then you know,
Speaker 1: four and a half hours after it's been sent from
Speaker 1: the the probe, we start getting the first bits and
Speaker 1: then we have to wait several hours for it to complete. Uh,
Speaker 1: So this whole process is going to take quite some time.
Speaker 1: And uh, the the probe itself has a couple of
Speaker 1: different recorders on its solid state recorders, each of which
Speaker 1: has eight gigabytes of storage space available. And that might
Speaker 1: not sound like like a lot of of data. Eight
Speaker 1: eight gigs, you know, and these are modern times of
Speaker 1: having cell phones with a terabyte on them or whatever
Speaker 1: it is that people are walking around with these days.
Speaker 1: But but in terms of space exploration, it's it's really
Speaker 1: quite a lot, right, And when you factor in that
Speaker 1: you're only able to send it at six hundred to
Speaker 1: bits per second, that takes a very long time to
Speaker 1: send that much information, assuming that you've even filled up
Speaker 1: the drive. You may not have, but still it's going
Speaker 1: to take a long time. I mean that might not
Speaker 1: sink in because you might not even interact with the
Speaker 1: measure bit in your day to day life. Like a bit.
Speaker 1: What is a bit? Jonathan? Uh So, a bit is
Speaker 1: one eighth of a byte, and then so a gigabyte
Speaker 1: is a bill billion bites? Uh so eight billion bits?
Speaker 1: Um Well, roughly speaking, because if we want to be
Speaker 1: really really specific, then you have to start going like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I kill a bite is actually one four But it
Speaker 1: doesn't We're not going to get into those those little
Speaker 1: tiny details. But yeah, generally speaking, you know, if you're
Speaker 1: talking about six bits per second, getting through a gigabytes
Speaker 1: gonna take you quite some time. Yeah. It just makes
Speaker 1: me think back to my early days of using a
Speaker 1: dial up modem and connecting to bulletin board systems. Um.
Speaker 1: I think it's said something along the lines that it
Speaker 1: would take you several hours to download a standard picture.
Speaker 1: Like uh like, if you were using your phone with
Speaker 1: the same sort of data throughput and you wanted to
Speaker 1: access a picture, you would start and then maybe like
Speaker 1: two hours later you might have a picture to look at.
Speaker 1: I remember doing that in like start a middle school. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: fine for Biddle school for you, Yeah okay, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I remember when I was in like elementary school, right,
Speaker 1: elementary school, fantastic. You try to download a picture, might
Speaker 1: take an hour, but you know, then you'd print it
Speaker 1: on your printer and on your wall. My favorite was
Speaker 1: when you would start downloading a picture and someone would
Speaker 1: pick up the phone line and yeah, I needed this
Speaker 1: picture of Judas Priest that I'm not even going to
Speaker 1: be able to find that sailor Moon comic again. So
Speaker 1: the the other things we might learn due to the
Speaker 1: new horizons traveling around will be more information about some
Speaker 1: of the other moons of Pluto, as well as Kuiper
Speaker 1: Belt objects. They're supposed to. They're going to try and
Speaker 1: have the probe fly by some Kuiper Belt objects and
Speaker 1: get a better look at those to get an idea
Speaker 1: of the composition of those objects. And then, assuming the
Speaker 1: probe doesn't collide with anything or suffer any other kind
Speaker 1: of failures, it will continue space monsters, yeah, starn sandworms.
Speaker 1: Assuming none of that happens, it will just continue on
Speaker 1: its way and eventually enter interstellar space, following in the
Speaker 1: footsteps of Voyager one, which did that back in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, although we didn't get confirmation of until much later.
Speaker 1: So a voyager to still not in the interstellar space yet,
Speaker 1: So which is going to be the first one to
Speaker 1: reach Planet X. Oh, by the way, this has confirmed
Speaker 1: there is no planet X, unless it's like maybe what
Speaker 1: if what if Planet X is just on the opposite
Speaker 1: end of Pluto's orbit further out, Well, then New Horse
Speaker 1: wouldn't have any idea, right, you know, I actually have
Speaker 1: heard I think people say it's possible for there to
Speaker 1: be larger objects way out there somewhere in the Kuiper
Speaker 1: Belt where we can't see it because it doesn't radiate
Speaker 1: or reflect enough light for us to detect. And who knows,
Speaker 1: they might be right. It's just one of those things
Speaker 1: where you know, we have certainly been looking out there.
Speaker 1: But if it's because there so far away and they're
Speaker 1: they're they're large, but not like like large in the
Speaker 1: sense of Jupiter large. They're not large enough for it
Speaker 1: to to reflect enough light for us to detect easily.
Speaker 1: I don't see why that's impossible large and made vent
Speaker 1: of black. Yeah, it could be that they just absorbed
Speaker 1: light to the point where it's it's darker than what
Speaker 1: black is, you know, like that material developed here on Earth,
Speaker 1: but a mysus place. It is it is, and it's
Speaker 1: getting less mysterious as we send more missions out, like
Speaker 1: new horizons. So this was really a lot of fun
Speaker 1: to look into. I mean, it was great to see
Speaker 1: the excitement in the general population as the images started
Speaker 1: to come back and we got our first real close
Speaker 1: up look of Pluto. I know some people thought, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's kind of sad. We've looked at all the planets now,
Speaker 1: like now we've got now we've got images of all
Speaker 1: the different planets. Where what's left. There's so much more left.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah. You can always send better cameras.
Speaker 1: You can always you can always send more instruments, you
Speaker 1: can always go further out, you can always land more
Speaker 1: stuff on weird stuff like comments. My goodness, people, we've
Speaker 1: got so many other things we can learn about. So
Speaker 1: and that's just within our solar system, let alone beyond it.
Speaker 1: So do not worry that we're running out of mystery.
Speaker 1: That is a ridiculous fear. It's a It is a
Speaker 1: a an enormous resource that we have only begun to sample,
Speaker 1: or just wallowing in it. Yeah. So hey, if you
Speaker 1: guys want to wallow in other stuff, preferably topics about
Speaker 1: the future, send us some comments and questions and suggestions
Speaker 1: we would love to hear from you. Send us your
Speaker 1: rant about planet X. Yeah, that's that, or you can
Speaker 1: send that to stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1: But our email address is fw thinking at how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. You can also drop us a line
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Speaker 1: We do read all of them, and we look forward
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