- [Narrator] We got our close-up of Pluto.
It's time to set
some new horizons.
(techno music)
In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh looked through his telescope,
and discovered the dwarf planet, Pluto.
Which races around the Kuiper Belt.
It's a region of space that's kind of like the
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,
only much
much bigger.
The stuff in the Kuiper Belt tends to be icy.
Made out of water or ammonia or methane.
You can think of it as the leftovers that remained
after our solar system formed.
On January 19, 2006,
NASA sent up a spacecraft that,
in February 2007 had a gravitational flyby of Jupiter
on its way to Pluto.
It was called the New Horizons spacecraft.
It would take another eight years
for it to get close to Pluto.
On July 14, 2015 it did just that,
and sent back amazing data and pictures to us
here on Earth.
Among that information,
we discovered that there are mountain ranges on Pluto
that are pretty young,
like 100 million years old,
or maybe younger.
That sounds old to me and you,
but on a geological time scale,
that is nothing.
Pluto and it's moons appear to be geologically active,
responding to forces we don't fully understand.
There is nothing that excites a scientist more
than discovering there's something new to learn.
New Horizons also observed
frozen methane on the surface of Pluto,
and what appears to be water ice on one of its moons, Hydra.
This information is going to tell us more about how
frozen planets form and evolve over billions of years.
There's something really poetic about the New Horizons
spacecraft as well.
Among all of its instruments,
it also carries a sample of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh.
The man who discovered Pluto
is now the person who has come closest to that dwarf planet
in all of history.
So what's next?
Well, for New Horizons,
it will continue on its path and pass into the Kuiper Belt.
Perhaps exploring some Kuiper Belt Objects, or KBOs.
This will tell us more about the material that's on the
very outer edges of our solar system.
After that, New Horizons will continue on,
leaving our solar system,
and entering interstellar space.
Following in the footsteps of the Voyager 1 spacecraft,
which left our solar system back in August of 2012.
In a way, New Horizons has closed a chapter on the era
of space exploration.
It gave us a close-up look of the last remaining
major body in our solar system.
Beyond that, who knows?
We need to learn more about interstellar space,
those regions between star systems.
Perhaps one day, we'll even launch a spacecraft
to send a probe on a flyby of a planet around another star.
Such a mission would take years to complete.
Even sending a short message from Earth to the spacecraft
and waiting for a response,
would take a really long time.
It reminds me of the Age of Exploration here on Earth,
where people would leave their families behind
and go out exploring.
The folks at home would wait for years to find out what
had happened.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The really awesome part about all of this,
is that we continue to learn through the whole process.
We're refining our knowledge.
We're backing up hypotheses that we made decades ago,
but had no way of testing them.
We're finding out new surprising stuff,
that's making us rethink
what we know about the solar system.
All right, here's your question for this week:
Where do you think we should explore next?
Should we concentrate on the solar system?
Or should we start to stretch our legs a little?
Wanna hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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(upbeat music)