One Man's Lifelong Pursuit of Pluto is About

to Get Real
When the New Horizons spacecraft races by the quasi-planetary body, Alan Stern will
have finally met his match
On July 14 at approximately 8 a.m. Eastern time, a half-ton NASA spacecraft that has been racing across the
solar system for nine and a half years will finally catch up with tiny Pluto, at three billion miles from the Sun
the most distant object that anyone or anything from Earth has ever visited. Invisible to the naked eye, Pluto
wasnt even discovered until 1930, and has been regarded as our solar systems oddball ever since,
completely different from the rocky planets close to the Sun, Earth included, and equally unlike the outer gas
giants. This quirky and mysterious little world will swing into dramatic view as the New Horizons spacecraft
makes its closest approach, just 6,000 miles away, and onboard cameras snap thousands of photographs.
Other instruments will gauge Plutos topography, surface and atmospheric chemistry, temperature, magnetic
field and more. New Horizons will also take a hard look at Plutos five known moons, including Charon, the
largest. It might even find other moons, and maybe a ring or two.
It was barely 20 years ago when scientists first learned that Pluto, far from alone at the edge of the solar
system, was just one in a vast swarm of small frozen bodies in wide, wide orbit around the Sun, like a ring of
debris left at the outskirts of a construction zone. That insight, among others, has propelled the New
Horizons mission. Understand Pluto and how it fits in with those remnant bodies, scientists say, and you can
better understand the formation and evolution of the solar system itself.
If all goes well, encounter day, as the New Horizons team calls it, will be a cork-popping celebration of
tremendous scientific and engineering prowessits no small feat to fling a collection of precision
instruments through the frigid void at speeds up to 47,000 miles an hour to rendezvous nearly a decade later
with an icy sphere about half as wide as the United States is broad. The day will also be a sweet vindication
for the leader of the mission, Alan Stern. A 57-year-old astronomer, aeronautical engineer, would-be
astronaut and self-described rabble-rouser, Stern has spent the better part of his career fighting to get Pluto
the attention he thinks it deserves. He began pushing NASA to approve a Pluto mission nearly a quarter of a
century ago, then watched in frustration as the agency gave the green light to one Pluto probe after another,
only to later cancel them. It was incredibly frustrating, he says, like watching Lucy yank the football
away from Charlie Brown, over and over. Finally, Stern recruited other scientists and influential senators to
join his lobbying effort, and because underdog Pluto has long been a favorite of children, proponents of the
mission savvily enlisted kids to write to Congress, urging that funding for the spacecraft be approved.
New Horizons mission control is headquartered at Johns Hopkins Universitys Applied Physics Laboratory
near Baltimore, where Stern and several dozen other Plutonians will be installed for weeks around the big
July event, but I caught up with Stern late last year in Boulder at the Southwest Research Institute, where he
is an associate vice president for research and development. A picture window in his impressive office looks
out onto the Rockies, where he often goes to hike and unwind. Trim and athletic at 5-foot-4, hes also a
runner, a sport he pursues with the exactitude of, well, a rocket scientist. He has calculated his stride rate, and
says (only half-joking) that hed be world-class if only his legs were longer. It wouldnt be an overstatement
to say that he is a polarizing figure in the planetary science community; his single-minded pursuit of Pluto
has annoyed some colleagues. So has his passionate defense of Pluto in the years since astronomy officials
famously demoted it to a dwarf planet, giving it the bums rush out of the exclusive solar system club, now
limited to the eight biggies.
The timing of that insult, which is how Stern and other jilted Pluto-lovers see it, could not have been more
dramatic, coming in August 2006, just months after New Horizons had rocketed into space from Cape
Canaveral. What makes Plutos demotion even more painfully ironic to Stern is that some of the
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groundbreaking scientific discoveries that he had predicted greatly strengthened his opponents arguments,
all while opening the door to a new age of planetary science. In fact, Stern himself used the term dwarf
planet as early as the 1990s.
The wealthy astronomer Percival Lowell, widely known for insisting there were artificial canals on Mars,
first started searching for Pluto at his private observatory in Arizona in 1905. Careful study of planetary
orbits had suggested that Neptune was not the only object out there exerting a gravitational tug on Uranus,
and Lowell set out to find what he dubbed Planet X. He died without success, but a young man named
Clyde Tombaugh, who had a passion for astronomy though no college education, arrived at the observatory
and picked up the search in 1929. After 7,000 hours staring at some 90 million star images, he caught sight of
a new planet on his photographic plates in February 1930. The name Pluto, the Roman god of the
underworld, was suggested by an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, who had been discussing
the discovery with her grandfather. The name was unanimously adopted by the Lowell Observatory staff in
part because the first two letters are Percival Lowells initials.
Plutos solitary nature baffled scientists for decades. Shouldnt there be other, similar objects out beyond
Neptune? Why did the solar system appear to run out of material so abruptly? It seemed just weird that the
outer solar system would be so empty, while the inner solar system was filled with planets and asteroids,
recalls David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at UCLA. Throughout the decades various astronomers proposed
that there were smaller bodies out there, yet unseen. Comets that periodically sweep in to light up the night
sky, they speculated, probably hailed from a belt or disk of debris at the solar systems outer reaches.
Stern, in a paper published in 1991 in the journal Icarus, argued not only that the belt existed, but also that it
contained things as big as Pluto. They were simply too far away, and too dim, to be easily seen. His
reasoning: Neptunes moon Triton is a near-twin of Pluto, and probably orbited the Sun before it was
captured by Neptunes gravity. Uranus has a drastically tilted axis of rotation, probably due to a collision
eons ago with a Pluto-size object. That made three Pluto-like objects at least, which suggested to Stern there
had to be more. The number of planets in the solar system would someday need to be revised upward, he
thought. There were probably hundreds, with the majority, including Pluto, best assigned to a subcategory of
dwarf planets.
Just a year later, the first object (other than Pluto and Charon) was discovered in that faraway region, called
the Kuiper Belt after the Dutch-born astronomer Gerard Kuiper. Found by Jewitt and his colleague, Jane
Luu, its only about 100 miles across, while Pluto spans 1,430 miles. A decade later, Caltech astronomers
Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo discovered an object about half the size of Pluto, large enough to be
spherical, which they named Quaoar (pronounced kwa-war and named for the creator god in the
mythology of the pre-Columbian Tongva people native to the Los Angeles basin). It was followed in quick
succession by Haumea, and in 2005, Browns group found Eris, about the same size as Pluto and also
spherical.
Planetary scientists have spotted many hundreds of smaller Kuiper Belt Objects; there could be as many as
ten billion that are a mile across or more. Stern will take a more accurate census of their sizes with the
cameras on New Horizons. His simple idea is to map and measure Plutos and Charons craters, which are
signs of collisions with other Kuiper Belt Objects and thus serve as a representative sample. When Pluto is
closest to the Sun, frozen surface material evaporates into a temporary atmosphere, some of which escapes
into space. This escape erosion can erase older craters, so Pluto will provide a recent census. Charon,
without this erosion, will offer a record that spans cosmic history. In one leading theory, the original, much
denser Kuiper Belt would have formed dozens of planets as big or bigger than Earth, but the orbital changes
of Jupiter and Saturn flung most of the building blocks away before that could happen, nipping planet
formation in the bud.
By the time New Horizons launched at Cape Canaveral on January 19, 2006, it had become difficult to argue
that Pluto was materially different from many of its Kuiper Belt neighbors. Curiously, no strict definition of
planet existed at the time, so some scientists argued that there should be a size cutoff, to avoid making the
list of planets too long. If you called Pluto and the other relatively small bodies something else, youd be left
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with a nice tidy eight planetsMercury through Neptune. In 2000, Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the
Hayden Planetarium in New York City, had famously chosen the latter option, leaving Pluto out of a solar
system exhibit.
Then, with New Horizons less than 15 percent of the way to Pluto, members of the International
Astronomical Union, responsible for naming and classifying celestial objects, voted at a meeting in Prague to
make that arrangement official. Pluto and the others were now to be known as dwarf planets, which, in
contrast to Sterns original meaning, were not planets. They were an entirely different sort of beast. Because
he discovered Eris, Caltechs Brown is sometimes blamed for the demotion. He has said he would have been
fine with either outcome, but he did title his 2010 memoir How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.
Its embarrassing, recalls Stern, who wasnt in Prague for the vote. Its wrong scientifically and its wrong
pedagogically. He said the same sort of things publicly at the time, in language thats unusually blunt in the
world of science. Among the dumbest arguments for demoting Pluto and the others, Stern noted, was the idea
that having 20 or more planets would be somehow inconvenient. Also ridiculous, he says, is the notion that a
dwarf planet isnt really a planet. Is a dwarf evergreen not an evergreen? he asks.
Sterns barely concealed contempt for what he considers foolishness of the bureaucratic and scientific
varieties hasnt always endeared him to colleagues. One astronomer I asked about Stern replied, My mother
taught me that if you cant say anything nice about someone, dont say anything. Another said, His last
name is Stern. That tells you all you need to know.
DeGrasse Tyson, for his part, offers measured praise: When it comes to everything from rousing public
sentiment in support of astronomy to advocating space science missions to defending Pluto, Alan Stern is
always there.
Stern also inspires less reserved admiration. Alan is incredibly creative and incredibly energetic, says
Richard Binzel, an MIT planetary scientist who has known Stern since their graduate-school days. I dont
know where he gets it.
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Stern grew up in New Orleans and later Dallas. His father was a business executive and his mother stayed at
home with Alan and his two siblings. Alan was 100 percent consumed with space travel by the age of 8,
recalls his younger brother Hap, an attorney in Dallas. He wanted more than anything to be an
astronaut.By the time Stern went to college, in 1975, the Apollo program had ended and the first space
shuttle launch was several years away, but after spending an undergraduate year or two as a slackerhis
wordhe began working to become exactly what NASA would expect of its astronaut candidates: an
overachiever. I made straight As from that point on, he says, graduating from the University of Texas at
Austin with degrees in physics and astronomy. His extracurriculars, too, were astronaut-friendly: He got his
pilots license, became a flight instructor
People make vows like this all the time. Theyre far easier to make than to keepespecially when your
career goal is something as unrealistically romantic as becoming an astronaut. and learned to skydive and
scuba dive.
He stayed on at Austin and picked up masters degrees in aerospace engineering and planetary atmospheres.
He took a job as an engineer at the aerospace company Martin Marietta, working on various satellite
programs. Then he moved to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of
Colorado, in Boulder, where he designed and oversaw an instrument for a satellite intended to study Halleys
Comet during its 1986 visit. That satellite, though, was aboard the space shuttle Challenger when the ship
exploded on January 28, 1986, killing its seven-member crew and putting the U.S. human spaceflight
program on hiatus.
Stern had become intrigued by comets, and ended up writing a doctoral dissertation on the evolution of those
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icy bodies, and he devised instruments to study them. His ultraviolet spectrograph would capture light
bouncing off a comets temporary atmosphere to find out what it was made of. Last year, when the European
Space Agencys Rosetta probe became the first ever to orbit a comet, one of Sterns UV spectrographs found
the surface of the comet surprisingly devoid of water ice.
Given that extraordinary accomplishment, Nothing if not relentless, Stern applied to the astronaut corps three
times after the shuttle had started flying again in 1988, and was even selected as one of 130 among thousands
of applicants to come to Houston to interview. In the end, he wasnt chosen. But he hoped hed get another
shot when Comet Hale-Bopp lit up the night sky in 1997. He adapted one of his instruments to ride on the
shuttleand who better to operate it, he was convinced, than Stern himself? NASA threw the decision over
to a committee of astronauts, who decided his expertise would be essential, and he was elated to be heading
for space at last.
At the last minute, however, NASA put a Canadian astronaut on the flight, bumping Stern off. It bothers him
even today to recall his disappointment. I was very upset because I realized there was no...the time was
running out. There was no way that I...it was all done. It was a done deal. Its the only time in my life I ever
cried over something about work, he says. I mean I just lost it.
But it didnt slow him down. In addition to overseeing missions, and a brief stint as NASAs associate
administrator for science, he co-founded a company called Uwingu, which raises money for astronomy
activities by (unofficially) selling the naming rights to exoplanets and craters on Mars. He also co-founded
World View, which plans to take tourists to the edge of space in high-altitude balloons, and another company,
called Golden Spike, to sell Moon missions to countries that want to go there. And one project could achieve
his dream of going into space himself. He and his team at Southwest have designed instruments for
suborbital spaceflights planned by the private companies Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. Scientists
will need to run the instruments, and, Stern says, Weve bought a total of nine seats, on separate flights. He
is determined to occupy several of them.
**********
There is another cause, however, that obsesses him even more passionately than traveling to space. Even in
grad school, said Binzel, when I met up with him in Boulder, Alan was talking to me about it. Hes like
Luke Skywalker. Then, in a spot-on Darth Vader imitation: Exploring Pluto...is your destiny.
Planetary scientists have learned only a few things about Pluto since its discovery: Theyve pinned down its
248-year orbit, and close observations of how Pluto and Charon circle each other have yielded their sizes and
masses. From these, compositions can be predicteda mixture of rock and ice. The bulk of the ice on both is
frozen water, while the ice coating Plutos surface is mostly frozen nitrogen. Surface temperatures hover
around minus-380-degrees Fahrenheit.
New Horizons is expected to reveal much more. Visible light cameras will not only count craters, but also
map hills, valleys, cliffs and cracks smaller than a football field. Infrared sensors will show variations in
surface temperature, perhaps revealing warm spots that suggest geologic activity. One set of instruments will
analyze the chemical makeup of the surface, while another, similar to the spectrograph aboard Rosetta, will
study the temporary atmosphere.
The list of questions is nearly endless. Does Pluto have an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface, for
example, like those on the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn? Does that ocean feed geysers that spray off into
space? Why does Pluto have a higher proportion of rock under the ice than Charon?
And then there are the questions the scientists dont even know enough to be asking. The big lesson of
planetary science, says Stern, is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should
expect the unexpected.
Come encounter day, Sterns wife, Carole, and their three children, along with parents, siblings, nieces and
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nephews, and several cousins, will join him at mission headquarters. I cant imagine not being there, says
Sterns youngest daughter, Kate, 24. Its like if youre married and your wife gives birth and you dont show
up.
Already the spacecrafts approach is making news. In April, NASA released the first color images of Pluto
and Charon from New Horizons. The best photographs are yet to come. Some Pluto lovers have speculated
that, in bringing this blurry blob into focus, New Horizons might find a reason to restore its planetary status.
Its a romantic notion, but Stern isnt convinced. He is focused instead on the details of the encounter, on the
data already streaming in and on a new understanding of an object that has captivated his attention for more
than two decades, and mystified the world for eight and a half. It says something very deep about humans
and our society, something very good about us, that weve invested our time and treasure in building a
machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system. But, he continues, it
makes it hard to celebrate and appreciate that accomplishment in the context of a constant discussion about
the demotion of Pluto.

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