Charles Krauthammer has a fine column about Pluto in the Washington Post.
“We need a pick-me-up,” he writes. “Amid the vandalizing of Palmyra, the imminent extinction of the northern white rhino, the disarray threatening Europe’s most ambitious attempt ever at peaceful unification…where can humanity turn for uplift?”
Krauthammer continues, “Meet New Horizons, arriving at Pluto on July 14.” After covering 3 billion miles in 9½ years, “New Horizons will on Tuesday shoot right through Pluto’s mini-planetary system of five moons, the magnificently named Charon, Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos,” he adds.
New Horizons will “shoot right through” rather than orbit Pluto because Pluto’s gravity is so week (0.067 g) that decelerating New Horizons from its 31,000 mph speed would take almost as much rocket power as launching it in the first place. As NASA’s Amy Shira Teitel explains in a linked video, “Unfortunately, it’s impossible launch an Atlas V with an Atlas V.”
There is a downside to Krauthammer’s column—he holds out absolutely no hope of human exploration beyond the solar system—calling promising exoplanets circling distant stars unreachable.
But Krauthammer adds this final note: “Every ounce of superfluous weight has been stripped from New Horizons to give it more speed and pack more instruments. Yet there was one concession to poetry. New Horizons is carrying some of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes. After all, he found the dot. Not only will he fly by his netherworldly discovery, notes Carter Emmart of the American Museum of Natural History, he will become the first human being to have his remains carried beyond the solar system.”
New Horizons will achieve its closest approach to Pluto at 7:49:57 a.m. EDT on July 14.
