My history with this mission stretches back before it launched. At that time I was at the Maryland Science Center, just down the road from JHU APL. We worked with the scientists on some outreach activities. I don't remember specifics, but I do have record that I was in the first 500 of people who put their names on the disk on the spacecraft. I have a certificate to prove it--printed in February 2005.
My supervisor got to go to the launch....I was so jealous. Soon after that, I left Maryland, but I know they kept doing outreach activities with the NH team.
Right after I moved to MN, the IAU decision came down. I wasn't ever upset that Pluto left the planet club--it made sense to me. Scientists understand the world by putting things they discover in common categories. Now that we know so much more about the region beyond Neptune, we know where Pluto fits in. I did just find and buy a new shirt "
Demoting Pluto to a dwarf planet was a reasonable decision, although the choice of nomenclature was flawed."Then I started doing planetarium programs in MN, using real time sofware for my shows---meaning it's not a prerecorded movie, but a way to navigate through a 3D digital atlas of the universe. And the kids always want to go to Pluto. I started counting down the years.....when I was doing my first shows, it was "A spacecraft is on its way to Pluto. It's the fastest thing ever launched from Earth, and it reached the distance to the Moon in 9 hours. How long do you think it will take to get to Pluto?" They always way underestimate. At that time it had just flown by Jupiter, and I think that these milestones are the best examples of the vast scale of our solar system. 9 hours to the Moon, 13 months to Jupiter, 9.5 years to Pluto!
8 years left to go...7 years...6 years.....it's halfway there....I'm getting to the point where the majority of the kids in my programs were in kindergarten or younger when Pluto was last known as a planet. Yet when I ask them what do they know about Pluto, they always say "It's not a planet!" And even some of them are sad about it....swift and I talked about this a bit over at cosmoquest. Truly, I don't know why they are upset, nor why Pluto remains a favorite. But it gave me lots of opportunities to talk about this, and use it as an example of science as a process, not just spitting facts at them.
2 years to go.....OMG it's getting there next year! Less than a year to go! THIS YEAR! I can't believe it's almost there!
For a while I was starting to get swayed to the Pluto is a planet camp, but not for reasons of sentimentality. Planetary scientists consider anything with characteristics that allow it to be studied as an individual object a planet....so to them the Moon is a planet, asteroids are planets, comets are planets......now I'm not quite as convinced. But I do still support the planetary scientists being responsible for defining planets because they are the ones with expertise, as opposed to people who study stars, galaxies, the interstellar medium. But, as long as they do it with a sound scientific basis and not for historical or sentimental reasons.
A year ago I planned a Countdown to Pluto event at my museum and it was pretty popular, so since then I knew I had to do something big for this flyby. It was really fun planning all the activities and we were fortunate to get a big turnout.....for some reason our museum is not typical, and summer attendance is way low. Partially because we have no AC, so we tend not to plan anything big. But this is when it had to be!
So the last month or so have been very Pluto intensive for me. I don't actually do many planetarium programs anymore, but I got the opportunity to in June and July. So I plugged the hell out of New Horizons. It is so fun to talk about something that I'm so passionate about, and that I know will get the audience excited.
And the week of the flyby was wonderful. I can't believe it's been a week already. Every picture release was a thrill. I was following twitter feeds and facebook updates for the new commentary. I logged on first thing flyby morning...I knew there was an event being streamed celebrating the moment of flyby, which of course was only symbolic because we had no way to know if it happened. But I did not expect that there would be such an amazing final pre-flyby release of the whole globe. The iconic picture. It literally brought tears to my eyes. I posted this for my planetarium followers on my museum facebook at the moment of closest approach: "Dear Facebook Followers, I have been fortunate enough to have been in the planetarium world for over 15 years. For most of that time I have been counting down to today....as of this minute the New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto, and by the time you read this Pluto will be in its rear window. Here is a sneak peak from NASA of the best picture yet, and seeing it brought tears to my eyes. I wanted to share that with you, because you are the reason I am in this field. It is an amazing universe out there! There is still more wonderful science to come....better images tomorrow and more science data in the upcoming months. Come back here and I'll share that with you. " I don't know how exactly a "reach" on facebook works, but that post was about 10 times the reach of an average post, I think because of how many people liked it and now many shared it.
I knew this was coming, but I never anticipated this feeling--I can't even put it into words here. We went from not knowing, to knowing. Pluto was just a blur, now it is a world.
Charon, too. The picture released of it on the post-flyby news conference is spectacular. And it is so much different than Pluto. A lot of artist's renderings have them as looking very similar, but these two are nothing alike.
I have to admit, I was a little disappointed in the images of Pluto from the first post-fly release. Well, not in the images themselves, but in my naivety about what was to come. I was reading and posting that the closest approach images would have 10 times the resolution of the last release. So I was expecting another full globe, spectacular in detail, and completely zoomable around the whole surface. When the single image popped up, a b/w picture of 1% of the surface, I was underwhelmed. But I should have known better. We'll eventually have the whole hemisphere (I think) in that high resolution, stitched together, and in true color. It just will take so long to get those images back. But right after my disappointment, I became excited again because I know these images, along with tons of science observation, are going to trickle in over the next 16 months. Pluto will be revealed, little by little, and we have no idea what to expect!
So for now, that July 13 release is more than suitable. It's simply amazing. A few artists rendering have been posted around the web saying "this person knew what it would look like!" For example,
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom ... _1979.htmlBut to me, nothing compares. We really didn't know. But now we do. Pluto is beautiful.
We're getting far TL;DR there. But thank you for hanging in this far. I have to move to the more personal side, as I've said before. I had three MAJOR projects with deadlines within 5 days of the flyby, with other minor projects going along with them. I was working late nights and even both Saturday and Sunday to get them done. I finished the biggest one by 3pm on Monday, then had to run off to a 3-4:30 meeting I was leading but had barely prepared for, then head home to get the kids. But on that ride home, I knew I was done(ish, the work is never done) and I could focus on Pluto. It was a great reward following such a stressful time at work.
Too bad ignorance isn't painful.
"Standing at the forefront of human ignorance." Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe
