"It's a whole new world. It's a planet I think everyone has tried to imagine."
Pluto is cold and dark, a distant and mysterious place. For generations after its 1930 discovery, the best Pluto pictures showed just a blurry blob of light. Even the basics about the dwarf planet remained unknown, such as Pluto's color and what gases are in its air. Could there be volcanoes, oceans, or geysers beneath Pluto's snowy surface? And how did it end up with five moons? What's going on way, way out there, almost 3 billion miles from Earth? What does Pluto actually look like? In July 2015 a small spacecraft was set to reveal Pluto to the world. After a journey of nine and half years, New Horizons was arriving at Pluto.
Mary Kay Carson and Tom Uhlman follow a group of planetary scientists, astronomers, engineers, and NASA technicians as they go where no person or spacecraft has ever been before. Led by the planetary scientist Alan Stern, the New Horizons team takes a lifelong dream of many space scientists - to get to Pluto - and aims to make it come true.
It isn't going to be easy. New Horizons is a robotic spacecraft that needs to fly so far from Earth and the sun that it truly has to take care of itself. It cannot rely on solar power, or even speedy communication with NASA if it gets in trouble. Getting a reply to a message sent by the spacecraft takes nine hours. New Horizons travels more than 30,000 miles per hour, so fast that a collision with even a pebble could do enough damage to cripple the entire project.
Did we mention that Pluto is the largest resident of the Kuiper belt, a region of space filled with hunks of ice, rock, comets, and other objects?
And that the team back on Earth has just one chance for New Horizons to fly by Pluto successfully?
Get ready to blast off - the journey to Pluto is one that you will not soon forget!
