Before the NASA Ames Research Center Pluto Flyby event July 14, Town Crier reporter Megan Winslow had a few moments to interview Dr. Michael Bicay, director of science for the center, about the historic New Horizons mission.
MW: Of the information that’s already been sent back to us from New Horizons, what has surprised you the most about what you’ve seen? I know there’s been talk that we know what the color of Pluto is now when we didn’t before.
MB: As we’ve taken pictures on the way in over the last few days, we’re seeing increased resolution. And we’re seeing more and more features on the surface of Pluto. And those are always intriguing because they tell you about the history of Pluto. And so just seeing the diversity of geographic features – geologic features like crevices, mountains, craters – is interesting, because when we launched New Horizons, we had no idea if Pluto was just a featureless body or not. So I think that’s the biggest surprise. It’s going to take many weeks and months to analyze what this means, and that’s because as we get the close approach image back tomorrow, a lot of the other images and the science data from this flyby – which is a one-time deal that happened this morning – is going to be sent back over weeks and months. And so we won’t even see the data for that period of time. It’s going to take some time to think about what we saw.
MW: After it explores the Kuiper Belt, what’s next?
MB: The Kuiper Belt is very vast, so the spacecraft will certainly lose power before it ever escapes from the Kuiper Belt. It’s a vast distance beyond Pluto. And just to put things in perspective, we are flying by Pluto today. We keep going, we enter the Kuiper Belt, where we think there’s probably a million Pluto-sized or smaller planets. And the best we can hope for is to probably visit one or two of those objects, and that would be four years downstream.
MW: And then, after four years, it’s likely it will lose power?
MB: It will lose power and just continue to drift outside the solar system and maybe eventually enter interstellar space much like the Voyager spacecraft has.
MW: I noticed that there are some investigators from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) at the event today. Do you know what they might be studying?
MB: We actually work very closely with them. In fact, there are dozens of SETI Institute investigators working here at Ames with my scientists. And while the name suggests that they’re looking for little green men through radio signals, it turns out most of the SETI Institute is devoted to more traditional scientific studies. And so we’re studying astrobiology, you know, under what conditions do life form? We’re trying to understand what kind of environment leads to an inhabitable planet, because our Kepler spacecraft here at Ames has discovered that planets are common in the galaxy and the question is, how many of them are capable of supporting life? So they are helping us investigate that. The SETI Institute has at least one member of the science team, too, so that’s a direct connection to the Pluto Mission.
MW: Do you know of any other plans to send probes out this far that NASA may be working on now?
MB: There are no current plans to send any other probes to the outer solar system. These probes tend to be expensive and therefore they can happen once every few decades. NASA has chosen to primarily study Mars; it’s the most heavily studied planet. There is an effort in the community to put an orbiter around Uranus. We’ve done a flyby of Uranus once, but we’ve never put an orbiter around Uranus. We’ve never put one around Neptune. We’ve never put one around Pluto. So there’s certainly a desire to go out there, but NASA’s funding is limited, so the community tends to prioritize what to do every 10 years, and the next-decade survey of those priorities is still a few years away. So if we do send another mission to the outer planets, it’s likely to happen sometime in the 2030s.
MW: Often there’s debate about whether all this money being spent on exploration is worth it. What would you say to the naysayers who say it’s not? Why do you think it’s important?
MB: I would say two things: First of all, NASA’s budget is about $18 billion a year, and all $18 billion of that money is spent on Earth. And so it pays for mortgages and it contributes to the country’s gross domestic product. But more philosophically, we’re a human race that was evolved to explore, and if we fail, if we stop exploring, then I think we’ve lost a fundamentally part of our identity.
MW: Is there anything else that you’d like to add? Any interesting part of this that no one’s asked about?
MB: Uh, hmmm. I’d have to think here (laughs).
MW: Maybe, like, you thought, ‘Oh, I wish they had asked me that?’
MB: I’m trying to think if I know any Pluto jokes. I can’t (laughs). I will be showing the image, the most recent image at the public event here that was released this morning. It’s rapidly become a meme on the Internet because it shows a feature that covers about half of Pluto and it’s shaped like a heart. So you can imagine everybody’s adopted this on the Internet now. It’s become a meme. So you can look for that today.
MW: I think one of the things that really stood out to me, that was very poignant, was to know the man who discovered Pluto is sort of aboard the craft, and I think that’s just a wonderful tribute to him.
MB: Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, and some of his ashes are indeed on the spacecraft.
