When the New Horizons space probe reached Pluto in July, it marked the culmination of a nearly decade-long trip. But for Bill McKinnon, a Washington University professor and a co-investigator on the mission, the fun is just beginning. It will take more than a year for the spacecraft to transmit all the data back to Earth, where McKinnon, whose research focuses on the planet’s geology, will be waiting to analyze it.
On the trip: New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, back when Pluto was still a planet. It took the spacecraft nine and a half years to make the 3-billion-mile trip. It would have taken longer, but scientists used gravity from Jupiter to give the ship a boost. “Pluto is the farthest world that the human race has explored to this point.”
On the return of data: “It’s a year-long data process. It takes about an hour to get a single-megapixel picture back. With the long-range reconnaissance camera, we take 1-megapixel images.” For the sake of comparison, an iPhone 5 has an 8-megapixel camera.
On what we’ve learned already: “We got up close and personal. Pluto is more complex than anybody dared hope for. These pictures show evidence of geologically recent ice flows, which we colloquially call glaciers, but of course they’re not made of water. They’re made of very exotic ices, like solid nitrogen or solid methane. There is another region that is huge clusters of mountains that jut up into the sky above Pluto.”
On what we hope to learn: “We want to put together a complete picture of Pluto’s geological history. It just paints a big picture of what dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt region are actually like. Does this look like anything else in the solar system? The answer is actually no. Every time we go to a new place in the solar system, nature trots out something that we haven’t quite imagined.”
On the accomplishment: “We did it. And what I mean by ‘we’ is not the team and not even Americans—although we were Americans and Americans paid for it—but we the human race.”
