Following New Horizons

My ‘Before Sunrise’-style love story with a planet that no longer exists

All images in this piece were published by the New Horizons team.

Has there ever been a place you knew you just had to get to? Maybe you saw it in a movie or on a postcard taped to someone’s fridge; maybe it came to life for you in the pages of a book. All that mattered was the sudden intensity with which you knew: I have to go. I have to see that world for myself. I have to stand there, staring up at buildings or forest leaves or the great open sky….

For my dad, that place was Colorado, and he tries to go back every year. For me, unfortunately, it’s Pluto.

The closest approach of the New Horizons spacecraft to the dwarf planet Pluto occurred at 11:49 UTC on July 14, 2015, when it passed just ~7,750 miles (12,472 km) above the surface. Newspapers across the world were covered in stunning images of a world unlike any ever imagined — the old ex-planet that had been little more than a fuzzy dot since its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 was now a full-fledged geologic wonder. And, as graphic designers everywhere gleefully noted, ‘It has a heart!’ In addition to being a brave new world, Pluto also had the good fortune to be a pleasantly photogenic one, ready to capture the attention of the public for months on end.

Meanwhile, also on July 14, 2015, I happened to be a twenty-year-old undergraduate intern at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, nervously making my way into the world of planetary science (and business casual dress codes) for the first time. I’d begun the summer thinking there’d been some kind of mistake, that my advisor and the LPI as a whole would realize they’d picked the wrong application file from the stack and ended up with a geophysicist-in-training who knew more about picking seismic lines than developing her geologic intuition, and that then I’d be summarily fired. And yet, day after day, I got to stay. When I paced the halls on my breaks I stared hungrily at the walls, which were proudly lined with image mosaics and geologic maps from decades upon decades of spacecraft missions. My world was suddenly heavy with legacy.

Then came New Horizons.

The planetary science community loves a good celebration, and the arrival of Pluto’s first spacecraft presented the perfect opportunity. The whole building was abuzz with joy and speculation; the interns were no exception. We were busy eagerly guessing at what the dwarf planet would look like, what images we’d get back and whether there’d be any geologic activity to speak of. Earlier that summer I’d tried to talk to one of the New Horizons team members that happened to work at the LPI; I was hoping to ask him about processing spacecraft image data and how he’d managed to be one of the best at looking at icy worlds across the Solar System. Instead, I walked into the doorframe of his office, made a noise like a boiling tea kettle, and was so mortified that I barely managed more than two coherent sentences before wobbling back to my desk in defeat. At twenty I couldn’t explain to this man why I was so captivated by his work, or the worlds he studied. All I had was a hunger that I could barely articulate. It was only when the pictures began streaming back from Pluto that my dreams solidified.

Do you remember the first time you found that place, the one you knew you had to get to? What was it that struck you?

In the images released by the New Horizons team, Pluto gleamed like a great ornament; color enhancement drew the eye to the stunning white of nitrogen ice and the russet stains of tholins. At higher resolutions, nitrogen ice glaciers curled through jagged mountains of water ice, while massive, isolated peaks to the south hinted eagerly at the possibility of volcanism, somehow sustained on a world so far from the Sun that it had taken a spacecraft traveling at a blistering 14 km/s (almost 40,000 miles per hour) over nine years to get there. As my fellow interns and I waited for the next image, and the next, a newfound feeling of longing hit me with a sudden, breathtaking intensity. The New Horizons team battled data processing time and bandwidth issues to send us glimpses of great yawning canyons and sprawling mountain ranges, and I felt like a kid with my face pressed against the window of an airplane. Suddenly, Pluto was alive, and it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. I’d started my internship with no clue that geologists could do this kind of work, let alone on somewhere so far away; I left it convinced that somehow, some way, I would do my best to be a part of it too.

I have to go there. I have to study this.

This is a love story.

Well, kind of. It’s a love story where one of the two parties has a radius of 1,188 km and probably isn’t sentient. It’s a love story about a person and a (dwarf) planet, and what it takes to go from falling in love with a place at first sight to actually being able to live and work with that dream.

And, like all good love stories, there were plenty of trials and tribulations before Pluto and I would meet again.

I left the Lunar and Planetary Institute with the half-baked idea that I could somehow manage to study icy worlds like Pluto for the rest of my life. I didn’t have a ‘good’ (i.e., academically marketable) reason for doing so, or a particular talent or affinity for some portion of geologic research that was applicable to the worlds that captivated me. All I had was that knowledge: I have to go there. I wanted to bury myself in modeling fault formation in ice shells, in cryovolcanic melt migration, in the geologic buildup and erosion of great icy cliff faces. I found paper after paper of scientists doing this kind of work; surely, I thought, I could manage to do it too?

Naturally, I ended up working on a PhD studying early Mars instead.

There were several reasons for this: the complexities of the graduate school search and admissions process, the effectiveness of the potential PIs that recruited me, and the shaky ideas I had about my career options at that time. The biggest reason, however, was a conversation I had during the earliest stages of my graduate school search with a scientist whose work I absolutely idolized. The ideas he had and the work he pursued were so creatively constructed and impressively written in every paper I’d come across that I viewed him with the same low-grade awe I typically reserved for astronauts and basketball players. I’d saved up days and money to go see him in person to ask whether he’d be willing to work with me, stepping into his office with the confidence of someone who isn’t yet aware of how academia works. There, he patiently but firmly told me I had no chance at all.

I was already behind, you see; not enough math or physics in my background, with no hope of making up that failing in graduate school. I simply wasn’t cut out to do any kind of modeling work, the kind of fault-forming, volcanic-erupting things I’d been dreaming of. He didn’t accept geology students, he told me; they’d be hopelessly overwhelmed by the math- and physics-heavy nature of the work. So, how about I look for projects more in line with my lack of technical skills?

Naturally, I spent most of the subsequent train ride in tears, wracked by newfound doubt. He had to be right, after all; he was one of the best scientists in the field. And if he was right, then I’d have to love Pluto from afar, since I plainly didn’t have what it takes to dig into the world myself.

I picked myself up; other graduate programs and other PIs managed to be interested in me despite my newly realized deficiencies. I was happy enough to get to work on Mars — it had plenty of breathtaking geologic features and unanswered questions to occupy my waking (and nonwaking) hours! But when I stepped into the lab as a graduate student for the first time in the summer of 2016, I carried that conversation with me. I began my career as a proto-planetary scientist with the deep-seated fear that I’d failed before I’d even started. I tried to build myself back up with a few different mantras: first, that if I started my career on one planet I could easily use the tools I gained to apply them to another one down the line (likely), and second, that maybe if I worked hard enough I could pivot to some icy worlds work during my PhD (very unlikely).

I settled into my PhD like a duck in water; that is, paddling furiously and constantly to give myself the appearance of being afloat. I did my best to throw myself into my work, lest my PI make the same realization of the famous scientist and conclude that I didn’t have what it takes. And I left Pluto behind, for the modeling geniuses and the math whizzes. Or at least, I thought I did.

After all, what’s a good love story without a breakup in the middle?

It’s now July 2020, five years after New Horizons showed us all a brand-new world, and somehow I’ve managed to become a part of the narrative. Five years after I first had the great, aching need to sink my hands into Pluto’s ice shell and dig, I actually get to do it.

The funny thing about those magical places, the ones you fall in love with, is that they stay that way long after you’ve visited many, many other locales. I thought that after years of work on Mars, the Moon, and other equally compelling geologic vistas that I’d move on from Pluto; instead, somehow, I loved Pluto even more. Even as I told myself, week after week, that I couldn’t do that kind of work, I carried Pluto with me. What lay beneath the ice shell? Was cryovolcanism really possible? How did the formation of the massive Sputnik Planitia basin transform the whole dwarf planet?

Then, a few years into my PhD, it happened — I got my turning point. I was offered the chance to do a Pluto project. If I was interested, I was told, I could learn how to simulate basin-forming impacts like those that produced Pluto’s most magnificent feature — Sputnik Planitia, its heart. I honestly thought the whole concept was a joke at first; the project was ripped straight out of my fantasies. For me, it was the kind of work that was so cool it seemed fake. Of course, the project came at a cost: changing subfields, advisors, and, eventually, universities. It also meant facing the deep-seated fear that the scientist’s words were indeed prophetic; that if I did actually try to learn the tools necessary to become an impact physicist that works on Pluto (and what a strange new title that was!), I would inevitably fail.

Fortunately, the twenty-year-old intern, the one who’d walked into a door because she liked the idea of doing science on Pluto so much that it interrupted her brain-to-body function, was still fresh in my mind. I said yes.

I have to go there. I have to study this.

So, what now? What happened next?

There isn’t a third act to this story. Technically, I’m an impact modeler now, and one who studies Pluto — check out my website! But here’s no real conclusion to be found here. Not yet. I can’t tell you about my happy ending, the one where I studied Pluto forever, and how all of it happened thanks to a turning point during my PhD. There’s two reasons for that: first, a thing you love, no matter how much, should never be your whole life; I can’t be a scientist that only works on Pluto, and I don’t think I should, so that’s not necessarily the ending I want. But second, and more importantly, I can’t end a story that’s still going! I’m in the very earliest stages of being a scientist, with the decades of ongoing work that such a job entails. All I can say today is that I want to visit Pluto again and again, to keep thinking and learning and growing with it.

Okay, but if this story has no ending then why are we here?

Because five years ago, the New Horizons spacecraft shot by Pluto, and the data it sent back transformed the way we understand the Solar System’s outer reaches. And, because I was in the right place at the right time, it also changed my life.

Since then, I feel like I’ve been following in New Horizons’ wake. I’ve been sifting through what it’s left behind and trying to learn as much as I can about a place I’ll never reach. Even now, after five years, I don’t think I could tell you why I love Pluto. Scientists may cling to logic, but there’s no real logic in the things that captivate us at the deepest level. Pluto is beautiful. Its geology is breathtaking. Even on Mars, with its epic canyons and vast networks of dry river valleys, we’re effectively doing archeology on a world that was. Pluto, by contrast, is a world that’s very much alive, in the strangest and most baffling of ways. Its ice convects; its glaciers flow. To be alive at a time when I can see that world for myself, and then learn enough to keep studying it long after New Horizons has continued on, is such a strange and wonderful gift.

I am going there. I am studying this.

Hey, running after New Horizons — not a bad way to start the rest of your life!

Thank you to the New Horizons team, for everything.