Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

PREFACE

INSIDE THE FARTHEST EXPLORATION IN HISTORY

In January of 2006, a tiny one-thousand-pound spacecraft, mounted on top of a powerful 224-foot-tall rocket, blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Thus began the longest and farthest journey of exploration our species has ever attempted—a journey to explore Pluto, the last of the unvisited planets known at the dawn of the Space Age. That spaceship, aptly named New Horizons, carried the hopes and dreams of a team of scientists and engineers who had poured much of their lives into what had—at many times—seemed an improbable quest.

Some sixty years ago, we humans began reaching across space—the final frontier—to explore other worlds. Before that, such explorations could only take place in works of fiction. But in this new era, we—sentient beings of the Sun’s third planet—have begun to send humans and robotic ships across the vastness of space to explore other worlds. The period of time we live in will forever be known as the era when humans emerged from the cradle that is our planet, to become a spacefaring species.

In the 1960s and 1970s, NASA’s Mariner spacecraft made humankind’s first successful journeys—to the closer planets—Venus, Mars, and Mercury, and humans first walked on the Moon. Also in the 1970s, NASA spacecraft called Pioneer were the first to reach Jupiter and Saturn, much farther away than the inner planets. Following that came NASA’s Voyager project, originally cast as the grand tour mission that would visit all five then known outermost planets, from Jupiter to Pluto. But in the end, Voyager did explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune but did not travel to Pluto. And so, as the 1980s closed, all the then known planets but one had been visited by spacecraft. As a result, Pluto, that lone, unexplored planet, became something more: it became to some a symbol, an open challenge, and a dare.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, which resulted and which we chronicle here, was a logical continuation of all those previous first journeys of planetary exploration. Yet New Horizons was also, and in many ways, like nothing attempted ever before. Many doubted that it could be approved, and even more doubted there was enough money or time to build it, or that it would ever succeed. But as we describe in this book, a dedicated and persistent group of scientists and engineers defied expectations and over twenty-six years, made an almost impossible dream of exploration come true, in 2015.

Our goal in this book is to give you a sense of what it took to get this landmark space mission conceived, approved, funded, built, launched, and flown successfully to its oh-so-far-away target. There are many aspects of this story that are emblematic of modern space exploration. Yet there were also incidents and episodes completely unique to the story of New Horizons: unforeseen hazards, threats, misdeeds, and misfortunes that had to be overcome, and there were many fortuitous moments where luck and good fortune played a key role and without which the quest would have never succeeded.

We, this book’s authors, are two scientists whose involvement in New Horizons has been very different—one central, one peripheral. But we are joined in our shared excitement over both the exploration of faraway worlds and our wish to share the very special, fascinating, and largely untold story of New Horizons and how distant Pluto actually came to be explored.

Alan Stern’s involvement is at the core of this story. Although literally thousands of people were involved in New Horizons, Alan was the project’s leader from its very start. In contrast, David Grinspoon played only a tangential role in this story. Like Alan, David is a planetary scientist but he is also a writer by trade. For decades David has been a close friend and colleague of both Alan’s and many other key participants in this story, and David was present at many of the pivotal moments in the saga. For example, David served on NASA’s all-important Solar System Exploration Subcommittee in the 1990s and early 2000s, where, as you’ll read, some of the crucial decisions were made that gave birth to New Horizons. And David was there at the raucous win party on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in 2001, when New Horizons had just been selected by NASA over proposals from fierce competitors. David was also at Cape Canaveral for the earsplitting, soaring launch to Pluto in 2006, and he helped the team devise strategies for public outreach surrounding the 2015 flyby of Pluto. When New Horizons explored Pluto, David worked with the science team as a press liaison to the media. Though many of David’s impressions and descriptions here are firsthand, he is not often a named character in this book. Rather, his voice here represents the book’s storyteller.

The two of us met twenty-five years ago, just after this story begins, and we’ve marveled at the series of unlikely events that has unfolded since that time, as we traveled through our lives, and as New Horizons fought for approval, was built, and traveled across our solar system.

In what follows, we’ve attempted to meld our voices to provide a combined and intimate perspective on the historic journey to conceive, create, and culminate in the exploration of Pluto—the capstone journey in the first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.

The core material of this book came out of a long series of phone conversations the two of us had, every Saturday morning for a year and a half, in which we retraced the long adventure of New Horizons as Alan told David his memories of the project and all its precursors and phases. Out of the transcripts of these chats between us, David wrote the first drafts of most of the chapters, which we then both edited and rewrote many times, passing drafts back and forth and winnowing the narrative.

The result: this book synthesizes our two views of this amazing tale, supplemented by the voices of numerous other key players in the story. But this book is largely the story as seen through its leader Alan’s eyes, as told to David.

Writing this book together presented some challenges. For example, how would we refer to Alan? We couldn’t, except in quoted passages, use the first person (as in I couldn’t believe what I was hearing!) since David is a coauthor. It seemed a little strange to use the third person (as in Alan couldn’t believe what he was hearing!) in a book with Alan as coauthor, yet, for stylistic purposes, we did elect to use the third person to refer to Alan. Alan’s voice, like the voices of others, appears in first-person quotes, often set off from the main text. Many of these quotes come from the transcripts of our Saturday conversations with which we began this project.

Modern planetary exploration is a complex effort that cannot succeed without the work of a great many people. Some of the participants in New Horizons spent decades of their lives dreaming, scheming, planning, building, and flying the one and only spacecraft ever sent to Pluto. So we want to acknowledge that many more individuals contributed to the exploration of Pluto than can be named in this book. That’s regrettable to both of us, but in the interest of telling a manageable story, we sadly had to leave out many who made contributions. We thank our editors for improving our story by insisting it remain short enough to be read.

Nothing quite like New Horizons has occurred in a generation—the raw exploration of new worlds. And nothing quite like it is currently planned to happen, ever again.

In what follows, we share what it was like to be involved in New Horizons, one of the best-known projects in the history of space exploration. The effort to explore Pluto was an unlikely and sometimes harrowing story, with so many unexpected twists and turns, seeming dead ends, and narrow escapes that it hardly seems possible that it actually succeeded—but it did.

Come with us now and learn how it happened, and experience how it felt to be inside it all.

—ALAN STERN, Boulder, CO

DAVID GRINSPOON, Washington, DC

January 2018

INTRODUCTION

OUT OF LOCK

On the Saturday afternoon of July 4, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons Pluto mission leader Alan Stern was in his office near the project Mission Control Center, working, when his cell phone rang. He was aware of the Independence Day holiday but was much more focused on the fact that the date was Pluto flyby minus ten days. New Horizons, the spacecraft mission that had been the central focus of his career for fourteen years, was now just ten days from its targeted encounter with the most distant planet ever explored.

Immersed in work that afternoon, Alan was busy preparing for the flyby. He was used to operating on little sleep during this final approach phase of the mission, but that day he’d gotten up in the middle of the night and gone into their Mission Operations Center (MOC) for the upload of the crucial, massive set of computer instructions to guide the spacecraft through its upcoming close flyby. That command load represented nearly a decade of work, and that morning it had been sent by radio transmission hurtling at the speed of light to reach New Horizons, then on its approach to Pluto.

Glancing at his ringing phone, Alan was surprised to see the caller was Glen Fountain, the longtime project manager of New Horizons. He felt a chill because he knew that Glen was taking time off for the holiday, at his nearby home, before the final, all-out intensity of the upcoming flyby. Why would Glen be calling now?

Alan picked up the phone. Glen, what’s up?

We’ve lost contact with the spacecraft.

Alan replied, I’ll meet you in the MOC; see you in five minutes.

Alan hung up his phone and sat down at his desk for a few seconds, stunned, shaking his head in disbelief. Unintentional loss of contact with Earth should never happen to any spacecraft. It had never before happened to New Horizons over the entire nine-year flight from Earth to Pluto. How could this be happening now, just ten days out from Pluto?

He grabbed his things, poked his head into a meeting down the hall where he was supposed to be heading next, and said, We’ve lost contact with the spacecraft. Then his colleagues looked at him, dumbfounded. I’m headed to the MOC and don’t know when I’ll be back. It probably won’t be today. He walked out to his car into the Maryland summer heat, and drove the half-mile across the campus of the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where New Horizons was operated.

That drive was probably the longest few minutes in Alan’s life. He had high confidence in his team handling emergencies: they had rehearsed so many contingency scenarios, if any team could handle this, it would be New Horizons. But still, he couldn’t prevent his mind from picturing the worst.

Specifically, he couldn’t help but think of NASA’s ill-fated Mars Observer. That spacecraft, launched in 1992, also went silent, just three days before reaching Mars. All attempts to reestablish communication were unsuccessful. NASA later determined that Mars Observer had experienced a rupture in a fuel tank leading to a catastrophic loss of the spacecraft. In other words, it had blown up.

Alan thought to himself, If we’ve lost the spacecraft, this entire fourteen-year-long project, and the work of over 2,500 people, will have failed. We won’t have learned much of anything about Pluto, and New Horizons will become a poster child for dashed dreams and failure.

THE LINK

As soon as Alan reached the large, mostly windowless office building where the MOC was housed, he parked, pushed dark thoughts out of his mind, and went in to get to work. The MOC looks very much like you’d expect a spacecraft control center to look, just like in Apollo 13 or other space movies: dominated by the glow of giant projection screens along the walls, and rows of smaller computer screens at consoles.

Throughout the nine long years of travel toward the ninth planet, the radio link to New Horizons was the lifeline that allowed its team to contact and control the craft and to receive spacecraft status and data from its observations. As New Horizons kept going farther to the outer reaches of the solar system, the time delays to communicate with it increased, and the link had lengthened to what was now a nine-hour round trip for radio signals, traveling at the speed of light.

To stay in touch, New Horizons depends, as do all long-distance spacecraft, on a largely unknown and unsung marvel of planetary exploration: NASA’s Deep Space Network. This trio of giant radio-dish complexes in Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia, seamlessly hands off communication duties between one another as the Earth rotates on its axis every twenty-four hours. The three stations are spread around the world so that no matter where an object is in deep space, at any time at least one of the antenna complexes can point in its direction.

But now … the DSN had lost contact with one of their most precious assets, New Horizons.

Alan scanned his badge on the way through building security and arrived in the MOC. Inside, he looked immediately for Alice Bowman, the mission’s coolheaded and enormously competent fourteen-year veteran Mission Operations Manager (hence her nickname: MOM). Alice led the Mission Control team that maintained communications with and controlled the spacecraft. Alice was huddled with a small group of engineers and mission operations experts in front of a computer screen displaying the ominous message OUT OF LOCK.

Their calm attitude was reassuring, but it struck Alan that they seemed pretty relaxed, considering the stakes at hand. In fact, as he probed them with questions he learned they were already developing a working hypothesis about what might have happened.

At the time of the signal loss, they knew the spacecraft was programmed to be doing several things at once, a stressful condition on its main computer. Perhaps, they surmised, that computer became overloaded. In simulations, this very same suite of tasks had not been a problem for the identical computer on the spacecraft mission simulator at the MOC. But perhaps something on board the spacecraft was not exactly the same as in the simulations.

If the onboard computer had become overwhelmed with tasks, they surmised, it could have decided to reboot itself. Alternately, it may have sensed a problem and turned itself off, automatically switching authority to its backup main computer aboard New Horizons.

Either one of these alternatives would be good news, meaning that the spacecraft was still alive, and that the problem was fixable. In either scenario New Horizons would have already woken up and radioed home a signal informing them of its status. So if either of the two scenarios was correct, they should hear from their bird in about an hour to an hour and a half, once the spacecraft had automatically completed its initial recovery steps. Alice and her team seemed confident that one of these computer problems was the explanation, and after so many years of flying New Horizons, Alan was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Yet, if they did not hear anything—if that hour and a half went by without a signal—it would mean they were without a good hypothesis for what had occurred, and quite possibly without their spacecraft for good.

As more mission staff started to arrive to help address the unfolding emergency, Alan set up shop in the Situation Room, a fishbowl glass conference room that looked out on Bowman’s New Horizons mission control room. Glen Fountain also arrived. Soon it became clear that the recovery from this would be involved, and that the team members might be settling in for a long haul—several days of overnighters to resolve the problem and get the impending flyby back on track.

If this were an orbiter, or a rover safely on an alien surface, the team could take its time to analyze the problem, make recommendations, try different courses of action. But New Horizons was a flyby mission. The spacecraft was rushing toward Pluto at over 750,000 miles per day—more than 31,000 miles per hour. Back to working order or not, it would fly by the planet on July 14, never to return. There was no stopping New Horizons as they sorted the problem out. There was only one shot at getting the goods at Pluto—New Horizons had no backup, no second chance, no way to delay its date with Pluto.

There is a phrase from World War I describing warfare as months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. The same applies to long spacecraft missions. And it was a long and frankly terrifying hour as they awaited the hoped-for signal to return from New Horizons.

Then, relief: At 3:11 P.M., 1 hour and 16 minutes after the spacecraft signal had been lost, signals returned and a new message appeared on mission control computer screens: LOCKED.

Alan took a deep breath. The hypothesis that the engineers had formulated must have been correct. The spacecraft was talking to them again. They were back in the game!

Back in the game, yes, but they were still not out of the woods. It was going to take an enormous amount of work to get the spacecraft back on schedule for the flyby. First they had to get it out of safe mode—the state the spacecraft goes into when it senses a problem, where every noncritical system is shut off. But there was much more to do to restore the flyby than just that. All the computer files that had been meticulously uploaded since December to support the coming exploration of Pluto would have to be reloaded to the spacecraft before the flyby operations could begin. This would be weeks of work under normal circumstances; but they didn’t have weeks, they had ten days until New Horizons reached Pluto and only three days until the start of the critical data taking for closest approach, when all of the most valuable scientific observations would be made.

Bowman and her team got to work right away, and the task proved daunting. After they got the spacecraft out of safe mode, they would need to command it to switch from the backup onto the main computer—something they had never had to do before, and then they had to reconstruct and retransmit all of the files that were to orchestrate operations during the flyby. And all of this had to be tested on the mission simulator before anything could be sent to the spacecraft to make sure it would work. And it had to be perfect: if they missed even just one crucial file or used the wrong version of it, much of the flyby they had spent so many years planning could be lost.

The clock was ticking. The first science observations of the close flyby—the most crucial observations at the heart of the mission—would be made just 6.4 days out from Pluto, on Tuesday. That 6.4 days was set by the length of a day on Pluto, one full rotation on its axis, meaning Tuesday was the last time they would ever see large parts of the planet before the flyby. If things were not back on track by then, there would be whole areas of the planet New Horizons would miss mapping—forever.

Could they get the spacecraft back on the timeline by then? Alice and her team created a plan and thought they just might be able to pull it off—assuming no new problems were encountered or were generated by mistakes they might make during the marathon, sleepless recovery effort they were embarking on.

Would it work? Or would they fail? As Alan said that afternoon, if you were on the mission team and weren’t religious before this happened, you were probably becoming religious at this point. Time would tell, and so will we, but first let’s tell the story of New Horizons, and how it came to reach this point.

1

DREAMS OF A GRAND TOUR

This book tells the story of a small but sophisticated machine that traveled a very, very long way (3 billion miles) to do something historic—to explore Pluto for the first time. It achieved that goal through the persistence, ingenuity, and good luck of a band of high-tech dreamers who, born into Space Age America, grew up with the audacious idea that they could explore unknown worlds at the farthest frontier of our solar system.

The New Horizons mission to Pluto had many roots. They reach back to the astonishingly difficult discovery of Pluto in 1930. They then extend, over half a century later, to the delightful discovery of a host of other worlds orbiting at the edge of our planetary system, and to an underdog proposal to NASA by a determined team of young scientists bent on historic exploration and new knowledge.

Scientists don’t necessarily believe in destiny, but they do believe in good timing. So we begin in 1957, the year that the first spacecraft, called Sputnik, was launched into Earth orbit.

KICKING TO GET STARTED

Sol Alan Stern arrived on Earth in New Orleans, Louisiana, in November 1957, the first of three children born to Joel and Leonard Stern. His parents say it was a very easy pregnancy, except for the final few weeks. Then he suddenly began kicking, like crazy. Alan’s father maintained, years later at his son’s fiftieth birthday party, that Alan had apparently been hearing people talking about the launch of Sputnik, and was clearly impatient to get out and get going to explore space.

Alan grew up interested in science, space exploration, and astronomy, from his earliest days. He read everything he could get his hands on about space and astronomy, but eventually ran out of library books—even in the adult section.

When Alan was twelve, he watched newsman Walter Cronkite on television describing one of the early Apollo landings while holding up a detailed NASA flight plan. You couldn’t actually read it on TV, said Alan, but you could see it ran hundreds of pages and was filled with all kinds of detail, with every activity scripted, minute by minute. I wanted one, because I wanted to know how space flight was really planned. I thought ‘If Walter Cronkite can get one from NASA, then I can get one too.’

So Alan wrote to NASA, but when told he wouldn’t be receiving a copy because he wasn’t an accredited journalist, he decided to double down and fix that issue. Over a year, he researched and wrote by hand a 130-page book. The title was Unmanned Spacecraft: An Inside View, which—as Alan is the first to note—was a pretty funny title for a kid who was entirely on the outside and learning as he went.

But it worked. Not only did Alan receive a whole set of Apollo flight plans from NASA, he ended up being taken under the wing of John McLeish, the chief NASA public affairs officer in Houston, often heard narrating Apollo missions on TV. In fact, McLeish began sending Alan a steady stream of Apollo technical documents: not just flight plans, but command-module operation handbooks, lunar-module surface procedures, and much more. Alan became hooked on a space career, but knew he’d have to study for a decade to get the technical skills to join the space workforce after college.

THE GRAND TOUR

Around the same time that John MacLeish was befriending him, Alan also got hold of the August 1970 issue of National Geographic, with a cover depicting Saturn as it might appear from one of its moons. The painting, showing the giant, ringed planet cocked at an angle, floating against the black of space over a cratered, icy, alien landscape, seemed at once both realistic and utterly fantastic. The cover story, Voyage to the Planets, is something that many planetary explorers of Alan’s age remember paging through as kids. It contained a level of magic—robotic spaceflight—that today would be found in Harry Potter.

The article described how in the decades to come, NASA planned to launch a series of robotic spacecraft that would explore all the planets and transform knowledge of them from science fiction fantasies into actual photographs of known worlds.

The exploration of the solar system was portrayed as an ongoing sequence of journeys. The article was accompanied by profiles of the first generation of planetary scientists—Carl Sagan among them—who conceived, launched, and interpreted the data from those first voyages. By 1970, NASA had managed to launch only seven spacecraft beyond Earth to reach other planets—three to Venus and four to Mars. These first interplanetary crossings had all been flybys, missions which simply sent a spacecraft zooming past a planet, with no ability to slow down to orbit or land, gathering as many pictures and other data as possible during a few hours near closest approach. (Note: we say simply, but, as the following pages of this book illustrate, there is actually nothing simple about it.)

That National Geographic article described how the 1970s promised to be the decade of planetary investigation, with an ambitious list of planned and hoped-for NASA missions that would open up the rest of the solar system to humanity. First, in 1971, would be a pair of orbiters to Mars. Next would be the first missions to the immense uncharted realm of what was then called the outer solar system, as Pioneer 10 and 11 would reach Jupiter in 1973 and 1974 and then travel on to reach Saturn in the distant year of 1979.

Shortly after, Mariner 10 would make the first visit to Mercury, traveling there by way of Venus, where it would make the first ever use of a gravity assist, a nifty trick that has since become indispensable for getting around the solar system. In a gravity-assist maneuver, a spacecraft is sent on a near-miss trajectory to one planet, which pulls it in and then speeds it toward its next target. It seems too good to be true—like getting something for nothing, but it’s not—the equations of orbital mechanics do not lie. For the planet, the tiny loss of orbital speed it trades with the spacecraft has no meaningful effect, but the spacecraft gets a whopping shove in just the right direction. Pioneer 11 was slated to use this same trick during its planned flyby of Jupiter, allowing it to then go on to Saturn.

If all these missions were successful, then before that decade was out, spacecraft from Earth would have visited all five planets known to the ancients—Mercury through Saturn. And what’s more, Pioneer 10 and 11, sped up from their close encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, would be racing outward with enough velocity to eventually escape the Sun’s gravitational hold entirely, becoming the first human-built artifacts to leave our solar system (along with their uppermost rocket stages).

And then what? There would still be three other planets left to explore, but at the vast orbital distances of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto it would take an impossibly long time to reach them.