For the major planetary encounters of the 1970s and 1980s, anyone not directly connected with the launch teams had to rely on the schedules and selections of newspaper editors and news broadcasters for information. But New Horizons was the agent of an interconnected world, so anyone with an internet connection could follow many of the encounter events and discoveries almost in real-time (once, of course, the signals from the probe had spent four hours and twenty-five minutes travelling through the Solar System).
Perhaps nothing sums up more how the world had changed since the Voyager missions than NASA's method of releasing the first sharp image of Pluto : via Instagram, owned by FaceBook. NASA's own site only showed the image one hour later, at about 8 AM ET. This was undoubtedly a shrewd move, drawing in audiences which might be less likely either to go searching for news online or to pay much attention to regular news broadcasts.
It was of course no surprise that US President Obama sent a message of congratulation regarding an event which was both of worldwide significance and very much an American triumph; and his chosen medium was just as 21st-century as NASA's' he sent a tweet :
"Pluto just had its first visitor! Thanks @NASA — it's a great day for discovery and American leadership,"
The teams involved in other recent and ongoing missions would be justified in feeling just a little hurt that the Pluto encounter received so much more public interest than their own missions, each just as groundbreaking in its own way : Dawn (NASA) went to Vesta and Ceres, the two largest objects in the asteroid belt; The Rosetta orbiter and Philae lander(ESA) made up the first robot-landing mission to a comet; Cassini (NASA/ESA/ASI) has been orbiting Saturn and beaming home information about it since 2004; The Mars Orbiter Mission (ISRO) is the first successful Indian mission to Mars, and Venus Express (ESA) entered Venusian orbit in 2004 and is still sending back new data.
Maybe there are several reasons for the way New Horizons have captured the imaginations of so many. Almost everyone on the (our!) planet, of whatever age, has heard of Pluto. The debate about Pluto's "demotion" from planet to dwarf planet made international headlines. The struggle for funding was harder, longer and more painful than - probably - any other space mission (the first serious plans were drawn up back in 1989). But perhaps above all it was that everyone knew that what they were going to see had never been seen before. The maps that had been deduced from Earth- and HST-based observations had whetted appetites far more than they had satisfied them: what were those dark and changing shapes and stark contrasting patterns? And perhaps there was one other reason: the knowledge that, in a real sense, this was the last big encounter. There will be discoveries aplenty ahead, but this dramatic reveal of a new world, with all its beautiful colours and mysterious landscapes, will not likely be repeated in our time.
After all the anticipation, Pluto and Charon might just have been a let-down; just a couple of desolate chunks of ice and rock, deader than dinosaurs, their cratered surfaces unchanged for a billion years. But of course, as we all know now, Pluto is as full of surprises as anyone could have hoped, with its dynamic atmosphere, its system of crazily spinning moons, its weird landscapes and its active interior. New Horizons will have fallen silent long before all its secrets are unlocked.
Perhaps nothing sums up more how the world had changed since the Voyager missions than NASA's method of releasing the first sharp image of Pluto : via Instagram, owned by FaceBook. NASA's own site only showed the image one hour later, at about 8 AM ET. This was undoubtedly a shrewd move, drawing in audiences which might be less likely either to go searching for news online or to pay much attention to regular news broadcasts.
It was of course no surprise that US President Obama sent a message of congratulation regarding an event which was both of worldwide significance and very much an American triumph; and his chosen medium was just as 21st-century as NASA's' he sent a tweet :
"Pluto just had its first visitor! Thanks @NASA — it's a great day for discovery and American leadership,"
The teams involved in other recent and ongoing missions would be justified in feeling just a little hurt that the Pluto encounter received so much more public interest than their own missions, each just as groundbreaking in its own way : Dawn (NASA) went to Vesta and Ceres, the two largest objects in the asteroid belt; The Rosetta orbiter and Philae lander(ESA) made up the first robot-landing mission to a comet; Cassini (NASA/ESA/ASI) has been orbiting Saturn and beaming home information about it since 2004; The Mars Orbiter Mission (ISRO) is the first successful Indian mission to Mars, and Venus Express (ESA) entered Venusian orbit in 2004 and is still sending back new data.
Maybe there are several reasons for the way New Horizons have captured the imaginations of so many. Almost everyone on the (our!) planet, of whatever age, has heard of Pluto. The debate about Pluto's "demotion" from planet to dwarf planet made international headlines. The struggle for funding was harder, longer and more painful than - probably - any other space mission (the first serious plans were drawn up back in 1989). But perhaps above all it was that everyone knew that what they were going to see had never been seen before. The maps that had been deduced from Earth- and HST-based observations had whetted appetites far more than they had satisfied them: what were those dark and changing shapes and stark contrasting patterns? And perhaps there was one other reason: the knowledge that, in a real sense, this was the last big encounter. There will be discoveries aplenty ahead, but this dramatic reveal of a new world, with all its beautiful colours and mysterious landscapes, will not likely be repeated in our time.
After all the anticipation, Pluto and Charon might just have been a let-down; just a couple of desolate chunks of ice and rock, deader than dinosaurs, their cratered surfaces unchanged for a billion years. But of course, as we all know now, Pluto is as full of surprises as anyone could have hoped, with its dynamic atmosphere, its system of crazily spinning moons, its weird landscapes and its active interior. New Horizons will have fallen silent long before all its secrets are unlocked.