Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

"Rip-roaring space exploration is the name of the game here. It’s an account of NASA’s New Horizons probe, which zipped past Pluto on a July 2015 flyby 4.8 billion kilometres from Earth—a dynamic soup-to-nuts treatment of the mission by its principal investigator Alan Stern and astrobiologist David Grinspoon, who was also involved. Thus, it’s the ultimate insider’s account. Crewed flight is the apex in space, of course. But un-crewed probes are astounding feats of technological derring-do. After more than 40 years, Voyager 1 (in interstellar space) and Voyager 2 (now in the heliosheath) are still transmitting data. New Horizons is out there now, too, barrelling through the Kuiper Belt. “The scientific payoff has been profound. It has revealed a world.This demoted runt of a planet, a mere smear in former images, has emerged as a haunting beauty with extraordinary features” Stern and Grinspoon deftly relate the struggles of the ‘Plutophiles’ on their search for funds and NASA backing, which took 13 years and six failed mission concepts before the craft could even begin to be built for launch in 2006. But the scientific payoff, as they eloquently describe, has been profound. It has revealed a world. This demoted runt of a planet, a mere smear in former images, has emerged as a haunting beauty with extraordinary features—‘bladed terrain’ (methane ice spires), canyons, possible ice volcanoes and Sputnik Planitia, a nitrogen glacier churning “like a slow-motion pan of sauce cooking.” So like Voyager, New Horizons—destined to fly by other objects in the belt before ultimately, decades on, winking out somewhere in interstellar space—carries, as part of its payload, our collective imaginings. As life on Earth is rocked by conflict and environmental crisis, these serene little scientific emissaries remind us of how different it can be when we collaborate selflessly in the getting of knowledge."