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UVa Scientists Helped New Horizons Get to Pluto

Nearly ten years ago, NASA launched the New Horizons Mission to Pluto. And next Tuesday, July 14th, the spacecraft will reach its closest approach to the dwarf planet before passing by and continuing on to other icy formations far beyond what we have explored before. WMRA’s Kara Lofton talked with two University of Virginia scientists involved with the mission.

When New Horizons was launched in January 2006, we still didn’t know much about Pluto, the mysterious demoted dwarf planet, except that it was a relatively small icy body with an extraordinarily large moon.

ANNE VERBISCER: New Horizons is going to fly by Pluto and just get a very quick look at what Pluto and its moons look like.

But even that short look will reveal a wealth of information, according to astronomer Anne Verbiscer, one of the two UVA professors involved with the mission. Verbiscer has been working with two different teams for the mission.

VERBISCER: I started working with the PBO Search Team, which is the team that is tasked with finding the next target for New Horizons to reach after it flies by Pluto.

She said there are two options for where New Horizons will go next. Both are large icy satellites; the final pick won’t be announced until August.

VERBISCER: After that I got involved in the hazard assessment as well whether flying by Pluto was going to be a safe thing for the spacecraft to do. Making sure that there weren’t any undiscovered small satellites that could be creating dusty rings that would present a problem for a spacecraft flying through them at 14 kilometers per second. At those kinds of speeds even a speck, just a few millimeters across, could destroy the whole spacecraft. 

So far, almost everything about the mission has gone smoothly. On July 14th, next Tuesday, after more than nine and a half years and three billion miles, the spacecraft will reach its closest point to the dwarf planet. Already new discoveries about the planet are made daily such as “heart,’” “whale” and “donut” shaped surface features suggesting, “deposits of frost – perhaps including frozen methane, nitrogen and/or carbon monoxide,” according to the mission’s website, which also cautions it is still too early to tell for sure what the shapes represent.

These sorts of discoveries are incredibly exciting for UVA professor Alan Howard who studies the surfaces of planets.

ALAN HOWARD: I’ve been looking at how icy substances on the surface volatilize or what is called sublimation or evaporation into the atmosphere or into space and then sometimes they get redeposited elsewhere where it is somewhat colder and these create specific kinds of land forms on the surface, particularly kinds of morphology on the surface that is diagnostic of the process.

Figuring out the morphology of a planet or satellite helps scientists understand its history and properties. For people such as Howard and Verbiscer, studying Pluto is particularly alluring.

VERBISCER: This is a region of the solar system that is completely unexplored. The furthest thing we’ve looked at up close is the planet Neptune and that was in 1989. And beyond Neptune we really have not seen what anything looks like. There’s thousands of objects out there beyond the orbit of Neptune.  Pluto just happens to be one of the biggest…but we have no idea what these things look like and we are going to find that out in less than a week now.  

Verbiscer and Howard will join a multitude of other scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to be on hand Tuesday’s flyby.

Analysis of the data coming in from the spacecraft will take years and will inform a potential future mission to set a satellite into orbit around the dwarf planet. But in the meantime, the world waits for Pluto to reveal her secrets.

Kara Lofton is a photojournalist based in Harrisonburg, VA. She is a 2014 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University and has been published by EMU, Sojourners Magazine, and The Mennonite. Her reporting for WMRA is her radio debut.