N4L 101: "Chasing New Horizons" by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon

Nonfiction4Life

SUMMARY

Astrobiologist, planetary scientist, and award-winning science writer David Grinspoon captures the bigger-than-life true adventure story of the pioneer flight to Pluto in Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto. According to Grinspoon and coauthor Alan Stern, “The effort to explore Pluto was an unlikely and sometimes harrowing story, with so many unexpected twists and turns, seeming dead ends, and narrow escapes that it hardly seems possible that it actually succeeded—but it did.”

At a now-legendary dinner at an Italian restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland, a small group of “Plutophiles” meets to strategize how to increase public interest in planning a space mission to Pluto. The same people eventually become the New Horizons team. But first, they implement letter-writing campaign to flood NASA Headquarters and political stakeholders, giving evidence of broad public interest in Pluto. They also organize conferences for presenting serious academic papers about Pluto exploration. Finally, after years of fighting an uphill David-and-Goliath battle, the New Horizons team celebrates its victory against Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). But not for long. Winning the tough, competitive bid is only the beginning. The underdogs continue to face hundreds of unprecedented challenges, and they must avoid even the smallest snag, or they risk losing the opportunity to build the first spacecraft to reach Pluto.

Somehow, however, against all odds, in 2006 New Horizons is on the launchpad in Florida ready to make the epic first flyby mission to planet Pluto, marking the beginning of reigniting the thrill of space exploration. In the words of authors Stern and Grinspoon, “Nothing quite like New Horizons has occurred in a generation—the raw exploration of new worlds. And nothing quite like it is currently planned to happen, ever again.”

KEY PLAYERS & TERMS

• Alan Stern – known as “Mr. Pluto” and THE insider of the mission
• Clyde Tombaugh – a poor young farm poor from Kansas and unknown American hero who discovers Pluto at age 24
• “Pluto Underground” – a group of young underdogs who politick NASA to fund a mission to the outer planet
• Ted Nichols – a high-school teenager who starts a “Save-the-Pluto-Mission” website and uses his own initiative, pluck, and a knack for publicity to persuade NASA to explore Pluto
• JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) – (in Pasadena, California) the premiere U.S. center for planetary exploration that is behind almost all the greatest space missions
• APL (Applied Physics Laboratory) – (in Baltimore, Maryland) a small upstart lab that outcompetes JPL by pushing the boundaries to design a less expensive spacecraft ready to launch more quickly
• New Horizons – spacecraft the size of a baby grand piano (with no moving parts) designed by APL for the 9-year flyby mission to Pluto
• Bill Nye, the Science Guy – one of many celebrity influencers who helps ignite and communicate public excitement and interest in Pluto exploration
• Brian May – guitar player from rock band Queen and card-carrying PhD astrophysicist who is involved in the science team and who writes an original song for New Horizons
• Gravity assist – a cost-saving technique using the gravity of Jupiter to fling New Horizons out towards Pluto
• Hibernation mode – another cost-saving technique that shuts down communication with the spacecraft intermittently, resulting in a decreased need for the ship’s energy in the air and fewer ground-team personnel on Earth

QUOTES FROM GRINSPOON

• “Once a mission gets flown, then everybody pulls behind it.”
• “The public reaction to the exploration of Pluto helped to reawaken something partially forgotten since Voyager and Apollo: that people across the world love bold space exploration, are inspired by missions to never before explored places, and that such missions even have the power to inspire people and change lives.”

BUY Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

RECOMMENDATION

Watch "Pluto in a Minute" YouTube videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6BBgLGgB7g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qUMY1oEvY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-zurr9PHKg&t=8s

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