Come visit Pluto’s Tombaugh Planetary Regio Park
The coldest place in the solar system
– UN Department of the Exterior

STL UFO

It’s all fun and games until some body gets perturbed. Wednesday night was Science on Tap night at the Kirkwood Brewery. Bill McKinnon of WashU was speaking about this summer’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto. He is on the science board for this program. Last Bastille Day, the New Horizons satellite performed like a ballerina, pirouetting through the Pluto-Charon system flawlessly. Five plus hours after flyby first word of this mission’s success reached the NASA Mission Operations Manager in the form of a single so-so photo and a system status check. All the memory sticks were full, all the appropriate thruster burns had occurred and all systems were still a go. Even though the speed of light induced message delay is only just over five hours, only, New Horizons would require two months to phone home its cache of photos and data. In space, no one can here you cheer!

See the nitrogen glaciers of Sputnik Planum
that flow among mountains of water ice
– UN Department of the Exterior

Launched on an Atlas rocket in 2006, in just over a year New Horizons was slingshot around Jupiter, rocketing towards a 10 MPS rendezvous with Pluto, almost ten-year in the future. McKinnon showed an annotated diagram of the satellite. Most of its instruments were boringly named with just acronyms, but two standout, Ralph and Alice. Did I mention that the probe’s first slingshot was around our moon? The New Horizons team was by necessity a small team, because after launch there wasn’t much to do for ten years.

This Halloween why not try trick-or-treating
among the cliffs of Pluto’s Cthulhu Ridge?
– UN Department of the Exterior