Cathy Olkin - On Approach to Pluto

 

 

So, it was the 4th of July this past summer, and I was really looking forward to a day off. I had been working super hard for a long time. I was working on NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, and there was always something to do. But I was going to take the 4th of July off. So, I slept in, I read a little, later, I decided to check email. Never check email on a day off. [audience laughter] There was a message there from the mission operations manager, Alice Bowman. My eye immediately went to it. It said that the spacecraft had gone safe. That's the worst possible thing that could happen. I couldn't believe what I saw in the message. I'm like, “How could this have happened? It was going to be a simple day, a day off.” 

 

You see. I had been working on this project for more than a decade. In 2004, I had relocated my family from California to Boulder, Colorado, to work on this mission. This was once in a lifetime opportunity. I'm an astronomer, and I had been spending decades looking at Pluto through ground-based telescopes. It's just this fuzzy dot. There's not much, you can't make out any surface details. We kept looking through these ground-based telescopes even through the Hubble Space Telescope. It's still just a fuzzy dot, because Pluto's really far away. 

 

My husband starts telecommuting for his job. We move our three-year-old and our five-year-old. We're here, we're settled. All we need to do is build a spacecraft, test it, launch it, and fly it three billion miles to Pluto. [audience laughter] So, we built a small spacecraft about the size of a baby grand piano, and we launched it on the largest rocket we could get, an Atlas V. It's about 20 stories tall. So, you've got a small rocket or a small spacecraft, big rocket, and what you get is the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It's going at 34,000 miles per hour. To put that in perspective, when the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, it took over three days. For New Horizons, the spacecraft passed the moon in just nine hours. We were flying. 

 

It's an unmanned spacecraft. So, I mean that figuratively. There's no one on it. So, we've got nine and a half years to go from Earth to Pluto. So, we've got a lot of time on our hands. We think about what data we're going to collect, how we're going to do it, and we make contingency plans. So, plans in case something goes wrong. We considered more than 200 different scenarios. What do we do if this breaks? What do we do if that goes wrong? We have this huge binder full of contingencies. 

 

So, I find myself on the 4th of July. It's just 10 days before our closest approach to Pluto. You see, we can't stop and orbit Pluto. We don't have enough fuel to slow ourselves down, because we're going really fast. So, we can't stop. We just have to go right by and take the best images we can as we're flying past. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. We have to get it right at this time. The spacecraft has gone safe, it's called home, which is basically saying, “Help me, I'm broken.” So, I rush over to the mission operations center. I settle in the situation room. 

 

This is a conference room right outside the mission operations center. You can see the operations people through the window, but they like to keep the scientists a little separated, so we don't get in the way. So, I settle in, I'm sitting with my colleagues, we're starting to get information back. And interestingly, I'm starting to feel calm. That sick feeling in the pit of my stomach is relaxing, because I've been working with these people for more than a decade, and everyone knows what they need to do. We all know what our responsibilities are and how to make this work. 

 

You see, we have three days to get the spacecraft back in working order. By July 7th, we have to have it up and ready to start executing those commands, so that when it flies by Pluto, we get the data that we've been waiting more than a decade for. So, we start to get information back. But it takes a while. It takes the signal four and a half hours to travel from Earth out to the spacecraft and then it takes another four and a half hours for it to come back, so we can hear what the spacecraft had to say. So, it's like a really slow conversation. [audience laughter] Imagine you say hi to someone, then you go watch three football games and you come back and they say hi. [audience laughter] So, that's the kind of data rates we were getting. 

 

We start to find out what went wrong. We had overtaxed the computer on the spacecraft. Remember, this computer is 10 years old. My guess is that none of you use a computer that's 10 years old on a daily basis for really important things. But we planned for that, because we sent two computers. So, we overtaxed the prime computer. And before it crashed, it started up the backup computer and said, “Call home.” Okay, good, it's working, kind of. 

 

Now, we're on the backup computer, we know what went wrong, and we've got a big question in front of us. Do we try and get back on the prime computer, or do we fly through closest approach on our relatively untested backup computer? You see, the whole time we've been flying across the solar system, we'd never turned on the backup computer. The last time it was on was on the ground when we were testing it a decade ago. So, we make the logical decision to switch over to the prime computer. But we're worried, because if we really messed it up, it may not start, and we're getting short on time. 

 We've been in the situation room for three days. People are taking naps in the conference room. There's pizza. Many orders of pizza are coming in, being eaten. So, we don't have a lot of time left. We send up the commands to switch over back to the prime computer, and then we wait. We wait nine hours. I find myself nine hours later back in the situation room, looking through the glass window at the operations people, hoping this works. When I see people start cheering, interrupting and cheers and excited, and I hear Alice Bowman's voice over the intercom, “We are back on the prime computer,” everybody was so elated. 

 

I let out this huge sigh of relief. I didn't even realize I had been holding my breath. It was amazing. We managed to get the spacecraft back in working order. Everything was going right, and we had four hours to spare. It was outstanding. We start going back to our main sequence, and we started getting data. It was absolutely stunning. Views of Pluto like we had never seen before. I couldn't believe the beauty and the details that were awaiting us at Pluto. We would have never expected the unusual terrain we seen. 

 

We saw a heart shaped glacier made out of nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices. At the edge of the glacier, there's huge mountains, mountains as tall as the Rocky Mountains, made out of water ice. Pluto has a large moon named Charon. And on that moon, there's a deep canyon, deeper than the Grand Canyon. All of these wonders awaited us as I had previously looked at Pluto through our ground-based telescopes, they were there and I just couldn't see it. It was miraculous. We had accomplished our objective of transforming Pluto from a fuzzy point of light to a complex, rich geologic world. Thank you.