Yes, True is about weird news. More importantly, it's about thinking, which implies a quest for knowledge and understanding. That's most evident in Randy's editorials; here are two of them on the same subject, starting with an editorial in May 2002:

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You already know I'm a space junkie. One of my former colleagues at JPL got a mission to Pluto up and running -- the only planet we haven't sent a probe to yet. It's tough these days to get probes built and launched, not because of technology but politics. A reporter once asked my friend "What is the most difficult part of the mission to Pluto?" He said that was easy: "the part from here to Washington." He was too right: the mission was canceled because, Washington says, at $800 million it was over budget. The problem was it wasn't really over budget: the final cost estimate was actually $496 million. Former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin admitted later that they needed $200 million extra for Mars missions, so they took it from Pluto, which killed that mission. After all, Mars is a sexier planet, in part because it will take so long to get to Pluto (nearly 10 years!)

But there's new hope: NASA requested proposals for a new mission to the Pluto-Charon dual planetary system, with a $500 million price cap (hmmmm, maybe they shouldn't have canceled the last one after all?!) In a development that I think is healthy, several teams bid for it, which helps drive costs down. A team led by the Boulder branch of the Southwest Research Institute won, and it includes a flyby of the unexplored Kuiper Belt just beyond Pluto. I attended a very interesting briefing by the mission's Principal Investigator, Dr. Alan Stern. They're now at a critical stage: you guessed it, the government wants to cancel it again! The mission is conspicuously absent from the 2003 Bush budget. There are significant scientific reasons to study Pluto. Stern says: "Pluto-Charon itself is also the only known binary planet, and has more complex seasons than either Earth or Mars. The Kuiper Belt is a region of the solar system where planetary accretion was arrested in mid-stride during the birth of the solar system, and we don't know why. Despite that, we do know it is a treasure trove for understanding planetary formation in much the same way that an archaeological dig tells us about ancient societies."

We're On the Way! New Horizons launches to Pluto on 19 January 2006, moving faster than any man-made object ever. This is True author Randy Cassingham is honored to be invited to witness the launch in person. (Photo: NASA Kennedy Space Center)

There are great reasons for getting going now: as Pluto moves away from the sun in its orbit, its atmosphere will freeze and fall as snow, and it won't be warm enough to revaporize it until Pluto gets close to the sun again, in about 200 years! Worse, because Pluto is tilted so far on its axis, as it gets further out more and more of its northern hemisphere will be shadowed. So if we want to SEE it within the next 200+ years, we must get going soon. Understanding the origins of our solar system is worth less than half the cost of a B-2 bomber or, to bring it closer to home, about a quarter of what Americans spent on Easter candy this year. Join me in supporting the mission to Pluto.

23 January 2006 Update: Mission Launched!

Long-time readers may remember that back in May 2002, I wrote an editorial in support of a planned mission to the only planet in our solar system that we hadn't gone to yet: Pluto. (The probe will also look around in the Kuiper Belt after it passes the Pluto/Charon binary ice dwarf system, where it's theorized that there could be 100,000 planetoids, with perhaps 1,000 being the size of Pluto, but I'm talking about the nine known planets in our system. If that's news to you, you get a sliver of understanding why it is interesting to study this portion of our solar system!)

Anyway, that was 3-1/2 years ago, and the mission did get funded, partly because of letters of support for the mission by people interested in learning more about What's Out There. (That's people in general; I certainly don't claim credit that it was True readers who turned the tide!) Still, Alan Stern, the Principal Investigator for the Pluto mission (called "New Horizons") appreciated my drumming up public support for the project. I was quite surprised that he not only remembered it after all this time, but wanted to show his appreciation for it in a very special way: my wife and I were among his invited guests to watch the launch of the spacecraft toward Pluto.

Mrs. Clyde Tombaugh Randy and Kit enjoyed meeting Patsy Tombaugh, Clyde's very sharp 93-year-old widow (Clyde, who discovered Pluto in 1930, died in 1997). Just after the launch, insiders learned that a capsule of Clyde's ashes are aboard the spacecraft, on the way to Pluto.

It was spectacular: the Atlas V rocket leaped off the pad, rising much faster than even the Shuttle. They used a BIG rocket: 2.5 million pounds of thrust to lift a mere 1,050 lb spacecraft. Why? Because it needs to move fast to get to Pluto in a reasonable amount of time. In fact, New Horizons to Pluto will be the fastest man-made object ever, cruising at 47,000 mph once it gets a 4 kps gravity assist from Jupiter. But because Pluto is three billion miles away, even at that speed it's still going to take over nine years to get there!

I spent 10 years working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but never got to go to a launch. (I did, however, get passes to see two Space Shuttle landings in the California desert, including STS-26, aka "The first one after the Challenger explosion.") But this mission is not managed by JPL, but rather by the Southwest Research Institute, and the payload was not built by JPL, but rather by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. I think it's terrific that the space game is being "widened" from NASA, and hope that trend continues.

(You can get more info on the mission web site, one of True's Bonzer Sites of the Week.)

It's about time we understood our own solar system better. If indeed there are 1,000 Pluto-like, Pluto-sized planets out there, it's not only time to understand them, but to realize that Pluto isn't an icy anomaly; rather, it would be the norm for planets in our solar system, and wet, warm Earth would be the real anomaly.

Rocket Scientists and Other Interesting People

It's very, very cool to witness a rocket launch. But it's even better to stand around and talk with the type of nerdy people who go to rocket launches! You hear all sorts of interesting stories.

Who's Who in Space It was our privilege to sit next to David and Wendee Levy for the launch. Sure you know Dr. Levy! He has discovered or co-discovered 21 comets and 41 asteroids, including the Shoemaker-Levy Comet which smashed into Jupiter in 1994.

One story I already knew: the Pluto mission got started when the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a new set of stamps, on 1 October 1991, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The set of ten stamps showed the nine planets (plus our moon) and a shot of the main spacecraft that had visited it. They were unveiled at JPL since the Lab has primary responsibility for the robotic spacecraft sent to explore our solar system. I still worked there; I remember it well, and remember being troubled by one glaring detail on the stamps.

That glaring detail: Pluto didn't have a spacecraft next to it, just the words "not yet explored". That really irked Rob Staehle of JPL. Rob was my first project boss when I was hired, and he went from the stamp unveiling to a friend's office to talk about starting a Pluto mission. Later, when Rob got the formal go-ahead to start the mission plans, he called Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, on the phone and asked for permission to visit "his planet"!

That mission was later canceled for political reasons, and here's the part of the story I didn't know until I got to Cape Canaveral for the launch: Astronomer David Levy (see photo in this section) was Tombaugh's biographer, and Rob and I were at his table at a pre-launch party when he told the story of how some guy at JPL had called Clyde for permission to go to Pluto, and how touched he was to be asked for "permission". And sure enough, that was Rob, and he was able to fill in the details for us. It was the first Rob had heard how touched Clyde was by the gesture.

It's just classy for a mission planner to make such a call, and I'm quite proud of Rob for thinking to do it. Here's his mission inspiration:

It's also classy to invite the Tombaugh family to the launch. Not just Patsy, his widow, but also his children and their spouses. I assume that was Alan Stern's idea; he did a great job of remembering people who made an impact on the mission. In other words, there are a lot of classy people in the space business.

We met lots of other interesting people while sitting around waiting for the weather to clear so they could launch. I already knew Alan Stern, the Principal Investigator of the mission, who invited us to the launch, but it was nice to see him again and, after the launch, personally congratulate him on the nearly perfect start to the mission. It was generous of such a busy, busy man to remember and greet us. There was Claire, an aeronautical engineering student from Melbourne, Australia, who came to see the launch, even though she hadn't been invited -- she just hung around the visitor areas at KSC in hopes of getting a glimpse of the rocket going up, and I'm pretty sure she got that view. (Alan had given me a mission pin, and I got another when I checked in to get my badge, so I gave her my extra. She was thrilled to get a neat "insider" souvenir.) Dr. Rick Shope, an educator from JPL who teaches teachers how to connect the space program to their students with kinesthetic learning tools, using interesting tools of his own: he's a mime who studied with Marcel Marceau.

I like telling people, "That's not rocket science -- and as a guy who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 10 years, I should know." Yet this really was rocket science, and the people who do this sort of work for a living are fantastic to talk to. I enjoyed it for 10 years, and I'm incredibly privileged to still be able to do it now and then. My congratulations to the many men and women who had a part in hurtling some cameras and instruments to another uncharted spot in our sky.

(Disclosure: I briefly worked on the Pluto project with Rob Staehle at the end of my career there. I was even a co-author of a 1994 article in the journal Spaceflight. As I recall, I was the one who titled it: "Last But Not Least: the Trip to Pluto".)

12 March 2007 Update: No Longer a Planet?

This week I got another note from Dr. Stern. He is mightily bothered that the International Astronomical Union voted last August to adopt a definition of "planet" to exclude Pluto. He thinks it's a mistake, and so do I. Tomorrow (March 13, the day in 1930 that the IAU announced the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh of New Mexico) has been proposed by the State of New Mexico to be "Pluto Planet Day" to both recognize Tombaugh's discovery and to express displeasure at the IAU's new definition.

It's not just politicians (and the public) who disagree with the IAU; apparently a majority of scientists do too, including Alan Stern, who notes that if it's strictly applied, even Earth doesn't meet the IAU's definition of "planet"! Who else disagrees? The European Geophysical Union, which has voted to come up with its own definition at its annual meeting next month, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "EGU and AAAS are both much larger professional organizations of scientists than the IAU," Stern told me in an e-mail. "I see this as strong empirical evidence that the IAU definition is fatally flawed and other scientific organizations are now stepping up to the plate to repair the situation IAU has created. The IAU has lost the confidence of too many scientists in this, and science is moving on to forge a better consensus. The IAU can choose to catch up later if it so desires."

So why, really, does it matter? It does matter, and here's why: Pluto is the tip of a huge iceberg, an entirely new class of objects that make up the Kuiper Belt, where there are perhaps 100,000 planetoids, with as many as 1,000 of those being the size of Pluto. IAU seems to be afraid that planets will not be "special" if there are a thousand or more bodies with the title; they're just these rocky, icy things way out there; they're ordinary, not worthy of a second look.

Well, I'm of the opposite mind: we now know our solar system doesn't just have nine planets, but more than 1,000, and with that comes the realization that we've only explored eight of them! We're hugely ignorant of our surroundings even in our tiny corner of the galaxy. Without fail, every time that we've sent probes to other planets we get big surprises: we learn new things not just about those planets, but about the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe in general. And what's the point of existing if we're not exploring and learning new things? "The cost?" you might ask. In 2002 I pointed out the Pluto probe cost about one-quarter of what we spent that year on ...Easter candy. Fundamental knowledge is worth far more than that.

We pompous humans need to understand that we occupy a minutely tiny part of the universe. It does us good to stand in awe with our eyes open to the vast amount and diversity of things that are not right in front of our noses. The label "planet" should be reserved for the most special things around us? You bet. Those 1,000-100,000 bodies in orbit around our sun are a part of the neighborhood and we should understand them better. They are special. But we know nearly nothing about them, and shame on us for our ignorance: it's time we knew more. By taking away the label "planet" from Pluto and similar bodies, the IAU is sending a message that these bodies are not special, they don't need to be looked at, it's not important that they be understood. But the reality is, we have no idea whatever how special they are, and the only way to find out is to go look and learn. And I have great faith that like every time in the past, we'll be surprised by what we find, and understand the universe that much better. We're not talking about the interest of a few planetary scientists, we're talking about expanding human knowledge and expanding the understanding of our place in the universe. That's "special" indeed, and our language needs to reflect that.