An Ode to Pluto

The human condition is both terribly depraved and spectacularly noble. We are capable of breathtaking cruelty and pettiness and splendidly positive achievements worthy of the gods themselves. We are doomed to express both these facets of our character simultaneously; there is no other way.

Among the greatest achievements of our modern world, among such wonders as the sequencing of genomes and the unlocking of atoms, there stands one particular jewel in the crown: the probing of space. Among the most sparkling, the most radiant of these gems are the twin Voyager craft—at this very moment speeding across the interstellar void—the panoply of Martian rovers, the scarcely believable Huygens Lander, sitting on the surface of Titan, and the New Horizons mission.

On the 19th of January 2006, an Atlas 5 rocket launched from Pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. On board, a probe about the size of a transit van with a suite of instruments would, after an unparalleled odyssey, beam back some of the most spectacular images our civilisation has ever beheld. New Horizons would be flung, at truly phenomenal speeds, to the farthest reaches of our solar system. Even with the slingshot assistance from the monstrous gravity of Jupiter, it would take the jewel over nine years to make its historic rendezvous with Pluto. Such a velocity was necessary that any hope of entering that distant orbit would not be possible. Instead, New Horizons would perform a fly-past, passing to within 7,800 miles (very close) of the dwarf planet. Then, with its purpose fulfilled, it would be consigned to forever drift through the endless darkness; our sun appearing as just one of the endless stars shining upon it.

So, in mid-July 2015, at roughly 36,400 miles per hour and after a decade-long journey traversing well over 3.2 billion miles, New Horizons whizzed past Pluto. Everything worked more or less perfectly.

Until then, the details of Pluto’s surface had remained a near-perfect secret. Even the mighty Hubble could reveal next to nothing. Its best efforts could yield little more than an indistinct blurry blob. New Horizons gave us a new window into that most distant of worlds. Man had expected a barren and pitted rock, a thing much like our own moon, or, at best, one of the more interesting asteroids. How could our expectations be any different? And yet, and yet, when the painfully slow images were stitched together back on Earth, we were treated to a most unexpected gift. A gift beyond all measure.

The images we received are a treasure, a genuinely priceless treasure. For Pluto proved to be no barren rock, but rather a dynamic world of utterly unexpected complexity and subtlety. When I see those images, even to this day, if I have a few quiet moments to really ruminate on them and let my eye study them, I feel my soul swell with wonderment. It makes my heart sing. Professor Jacob Bronowski once spoke of the Music of the Spheres, and though it’s not entirely what he meant, my inner score cannot help but accompany the New Horizons images with some soaring soundtrack. Something glorious and majestic by Handel, or Mozart perhaps. No! Something less bombastic, more delicate; Elgar. Yes. Something not too overwrought, something measured yet beautiful, beautiful to the point of touching on the melancholic. That is what the New Horizons images evoke in me. A sense of awe I cannot express. I simply do not have the words.

We see a large atmosphere—Pluto’s gravity being too weak to hug it close to the surface like Earth—with a great many strata of haze layers; the remote light from our Sun spilling through, streaming down on a surface of largely Nitrogen ice. Sprawling mountain ranges made of water ice, topped by methane cornices. Vast tumbling glaciers, and colossal craterless ice plains with polygonal patterns, suggest sublimation and potential subsurface oceans. Cryovolcanoes that once—and perhaps still do—spew forth a slurry of matter at -229 degrees centigrade. Localised unique characteristics that from above look like snakeskin or tree bark. More ancient regions, scared by impacts, sprinkled with tholins—a tar-like form of hydrocarbon—lending Pluto some extreme contrasts in colour. All of this is served up with such a low gravity and a minuscule amount of pressure, that these fractured features and mountain chains can grow gigantic in proportion to the orb as a whole, making Pluto seem like some kind of frozen toy version of more conventional planets. 

The tremendous, monumental achievement which the New Horizons mission achieved, significantly advancing our understanding of our own solar system, has to be squarely placed at the feet of NASA and their New Frontiers programme. They, and the United States of America, deserve all credit. For there are those who seek to malign and tarnish the United States at every turn, to rob it of all its achievements, to sully and disgrace it wherever and whenever possible, to besmirch it, to peddle the lie that it has contributed nothing to human progress. Such people should look upon the New Horizon images and eat their words, choke on their resentment, and cope as hard as they dare with the unassailable fact that NASA and the United States have indeed furthered civilisation in the grandest sense.