Alan Stern, lead scientist on NASA’s mission to Pluto, has been waiting nearly three decades to see the dwarf planet up close
Jun 16, 2015
|Alan Stern (), lead scientist on NASA's mission to Pluto, has been waiting nearly three decades to view the celestial body and its moons in detail.
Pluto was still a planet when a spacecraft began its journey nine years ago to that small, cold hunk of rock and ice. This month the nasa probe—the fastest spacecraft ever launched—finally reaches its primary target after a five-billion-kilometer cruise. On July 14 it will fly past what is now classified as a dwarf planet, becoming the first spacecraft to visit that faraway world and in doing so completing the initial exploration of our solar system that was conceived with the first interplanetary missions half a century ago. Already the approaching spacecraft, called New Horizons (), has snapped unprecedented pictures, spying what looks to be an ice cap at one of Pluto's poles. At its closest, New Horizons's suite of cameras, spectrometers and sensors will scrutinize the body's surface and atmosphere from an altitude of just 12,500 kilometers. 's Lee Billings and New Horizons's principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist, discussed this historic, long-awaited mission. Edited excerpts follow.
I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. They're wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether they're light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. We're seeing intriguing things, but we really don't know what's in there. I've been waiting 26 years to unwrap these presents. This year Christmas comes in July!
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