Addendum to the article:
Is NASA’s New Horizons flyby Target a Comet in waiting?
New Horizons was conceived with a secondary objective — the exploration of the Kuiper Belt. Before Pluto had even been reached, the project scientists were busy searching for a next destination. They utilized the best ground telescopes but to no avail. A suitable Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) was elusive to the ground scopes limited by the life-giving but obscuring atmosphere of Earth. They turned to the Hubble Space Telescope and within days, it found three candidates. KBO Mu69 was chosen because it would require the least amount of the limited propulsion onboard to reach it.
Ultima Thule will be the most distant object ever studied by a human-made machine. Forget about the starship Enterprise and its warp drive jaunts across the galaxy or the travails of the hitchhiker in the Heart of Gold. New Horizons is our starship. Not our first but it is the most distant ship that we have complete control and operations to this day. The Voyager space probes are commandable but cannot be steered to a new destination.
In the three year 1 billion mile journey from Pluto to Ultima Thule, besides the many analyses of the data of the Pluto flyby, analysis and study continuing to this day, Alan Stern and David Grinspoon had time to write the story of the personal journey to Pluto. This mission just didn’t pop into some NASA scientists head one day, say around year 2000. A common rule of thumb is that NASA projects take about 4 years from concept to launch. In fact, New Horizons has the most tortured past conceivable.
Interest in visiting Pluto began with the discovery in 1964 by Gary Flandro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that an alignment of planets would happen in the 1970s that could permit a gravitational game of hopscotch past all the outer planets. Each giant planet would slingshot a probe to the next planet until even tiny Pluto could be reached, all in the matter of a dozen years. However, gravity is not the greatest force that influences NASA’s missions. The dollar and decisions handed to them from congressional committees ultimately led to time and funding constraints that led to Voyager 1 & 2 and flybys of all the outer planets except Pluto.
So NASA scientists, planetary scientists and engineers kept a vigil for a Pluto mission and through the twists and turns of NASA funding shortfalls and revised objectives such as the Mars missions, the Pluto torch was finally carried by Alan Stern and his group informally called the Pluto Underground. [This is where reading their book “Chasing New Horizons” tells the story in full] There were funding near misses that delayed a Pluto mission by a decade but in 2001 project development began and 4 ½ years later, in January 2006, it was launched by the most powerful Atlas V on a direct route to Pluto. Jupiter provided a modest gravity assist and a brief visit but on the most part the spacecraft rested dormant waiting to reach Pluto.
And after Pluto and after spending months sending data back home on a 30 watt signal across >3 billion miles (imagine the most 50 watt signals of ham radio operators that with luck can reach 3000 miles), New Horizons was put to sleep for its second journey — 3 years to Ultima Thule.
When New Horizons departed, we had known of Pluto since 1930 by discoverer Clyde Tombaugh whose ashes reside in a capsule onboard the craft. We had studied Pluto then in the 1970s discovered Charon its largest moon and then later the tiny moonlets. We were able to crudely visualize Pluto using Hubble and image processing magic. In the greatest sense of the word, humanity’s new horizon — expanding of our near horizon, began with the selection of KBO Mu69 and turning New Horizons space probe on a new trek for the flyby — now just hours away.
The expansion of the horizons within our modest Solar System began much further back — back to circa 1600. German astronomer Johannes Kepler born of the Black Forest of Schwabenland was sparked to become astronomer when at age 6 his mother showed him the great comet of 1577. Astronomer Tycho Brahe meticulously studied the comet’s motion and also the motion of all the known planets. With Tycho’s great observational dataset and a mastery of mathematics, Kepler created modern astronomy. The configuration, the mechanics and distances of the Solar System were revealed. Telescopes were then developed and 180 years later(1781) another planet was discovered — Uranus. Sixty-five years later(1846), Neptune’s orbit was mathematically predicted and it was discovered.
Horizons in the Solar System continued to expand outward. In between Uranus and Neptune, around 1800, small bodies were found between the relatively vast void between Mars and Jupiter. The Asteroid Belt was revealed. Finally, the Pluto discovery added a ninth planet in 1930. And in 1943, the theorist, Kenneth Edgeworth, proposed that a belt of small bodies leftover from the original planetary nebula might be present beyond Neptune. Astronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951 further theorized of an outer belt of small bodies. Finally, modern instruments began to reveal Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) in the region some astronomers prefer to call the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. A theoretical proposal appeared contemporary with the Kuiper’s paper that there is another region much further out which is now known as the Oort Cloud, ten times further from the Sun than the Kuiper Belt.
There is the 50 year legacy of NASA exploration in which New Horizons is arguably the longest thread of perseverance to exploration. And there is this deep time legacy to Kepler — 400 years of modern astronomy that has expanded the horizons of the Solar System. This year, Kepler’s epoch namesake mission ended that has forever placed us among a trillion other planets within our galaxy alone. The Hubble Space Telescope showed its latest signs of old age but recovered and continues to push outward our most extreme horizons of the Universe. And New Horizons approaches a small body no more than 25 miles across that has likely resided within the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt since the beginning of the Solar System.
