(inspiring music)
CNDH reports normal status,
our SSR pointers are where we expect them to be,
which means we have reported the expected amount of data.
Oh, copy that.
Looks like we have a data report.
(people applauding)
We have a healthy spacecraft and recorded data
of the Pluto system, and we're outbound for Pluto.
(audience applauding)
In 2015, the New Horizons mission
changed our understanding of the solar system
as it rocketed past Pluto,
(gentle music)
providing breathtaking, never before seen images
of the dwarf planet in exquisite detail.
(gentle music)
Pluto becomes a known world,
but nothing is quite as startling
as the colors seen in this composite portrait.
Blue, red, and infrared images
resolve details as small as 8/10 of a mile.
(gentle music)
Pluto is far more active and diverse
than even my imagination said it was gonna be.
That's okay, 'cause every time we've gone to a new place,
we always find our imaginations are never up to the task.
24 hours after passing through
the Pluto-Charon system, New Horizons
is nearly a million miles behind the planet,
making its way toward its next target,
the Kuiper Belt object designated as Ultima Thule,
what scientists believe to be a potato shaped chunk
45 kilometers across, likely similar
to the Plutonian moons Hydra or Styx.
But it won't be until New Horizons arrives
at Ultima Thule that its true shape will be revealed.
The rendezvous with Ultima Thule is set for January 2019.
By then, New Horizons will be
another billion miles from Pluto.
(gentle music)
By 2017, New Horizons was deep in a realm
of far flung chunks of ice,
but what is this new region?
Science now divides our solar system into three zones,
the innermost planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars,
are small, rocky and close to the Sun.
This is the first zone.
The second zone is the domain of gas giants,
Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Tiny Pluto marks the outer edge.
Yet, astronomer Gerard Kuiper predicts the existence
of a belt of icy bodies that lie beyond Neptune,
girdling the entire solar system.
A vast flattened plane of icy bodies
now called the Kuiper Belt.
(soft music)
The power levels and dealing with
some other technical challenges,
conspire to make this a tougher and riskier flyby.
In fact, there's one shot I wanna tell you about.
At closest approach, we're gonna try
to image Ultima at three times the resolution
that we had for Pluto.
If we can accomplish that,
it'll be spectacular. Wow.
But we've gotta shoot at a moving target.
As we go by, we're gonna fire off hundreds of images
hoping to capture it somewhere in that strip.
Wow, yeah. -: It requires
extremely precise navigation, much more precise
than we've ever tried before,
and we might get it, and we might not,
and if we get it, it's gonna be spectacular.
(dramatic music)
Three and a half years
after revolutionizing our understanding of Pluto,
the New Horizons spacecraft continues
its journey into deep space.
It's traveled one billion miles
since rocketing past the dwarf planet.
(dramatic music)
Cruising at speeds of almost 10 miles per second,
the piano sized craft beams back
early pictures of Ultima Thule,
and it's not a potato shaped object, as once believed.
Instead, it resembles a snowman.
(mysterious music)
If you think about it, by analogy,
New Horizons is going to the farthest part
of our solar system and it is very cold and dark
and barren out there, so unlike an asteroid,
which is actually just a piece of rock
that has melted and changed over
with some alteration by some internal water,
Ultima Thule never melted, never differentiated,
never made a core, even like our planet Earth has a core.
All that stuff is just as it came from the galaxy,
we think, and it is just a random
loose snowball of created material.
So we'll see if that's really true.
And on January 1st, 2019,
New Horizons will ring in the new year
by traveling back in time and studying
the earliest days of our solar system.
(gentle music)
The Kuiper Belt is the edge of our very solar system.
It's a part of the original disc
that the sun and the planets formed out of
that's at the very edge, before you just get
into the galaxy and the region between the stars.
And at that very edge of the disc,
there wasn't enough stuff to make giant planets,
and make big stars like our sun.
There was just enough stuff to make
small dwarf planets and snowballs.
New Horizons will fly past
the 20 mile wide asteroid in a split second,
but the images and the data beamed back to earth
will provide scientists with a lifetime of information.
Ultima Thule, we know very little about right now,
but we think it's the most primitive object
ever visited by a spacecraft.
That's preserved, but the material was,
at the time of the formation of the solar system.
If you were on board New Horizons right now,
Ultima Thule would be about as big in the sky
as a full moon over the earth.
So we're gonna start the countdown.
We're almost there.
15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10,
nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
(fireworks bursting) (crowd cheering)
Go New Horizons!
We've just accomplished
the most distant flyby.
We are ready for Ultima Thule's science transmission
(crowd cheering) at 200 UTC today.
Science to help us understand the origins
of our solar system. That's it.
(crowd applauding and cheering)
Very nice. (crowd applauding)
Never seen this before.
Ultima Thule has been sitting at pretty much
the same place, the same distance away from the sun,
for 4.6 billion years.
As relatively small and in a very very cold region of space,
it's been well preserved, it's really,
it's a relic of the formation of the solar system.
(mysterious music)
As data continues to reach earth,
Ultima Thule reveals its true shape
and earlier predictions are proven false.
From the side, the snowman
looks more like two lumpy pancakes,
(bright string music)
providing another clue to the mystery
of our solar system's formation and evolution.
(bright string music)
We know there was a period of time
in the first billion years that this
was a dangerous place to be,
anywhere in the solar system.
One epoch in the past of our solar system,
the giant planets were all moving around.
They are actually plowing into the original Kuiper Belt.
We're only seeing the remnants of the Kuiper Belt right now
and Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
probably plowed into them and just scattered 'em
all over the place.
These scattered bodies
caused numerous collisions, most small.
Some, large, and in the case of Pluto
and one other planet in our solar system,
there was a collision big enough to smash the entire world.
That other planet is Earth, and from the scattered debris,
our Moon was formed.
Astronomers call this period the Late Heavy Bombardment.
The abundant craters across the face of the Moon
are a testament to the violence of this epoch.
(dramatic music)
We think that these large scale collisions
between planets early in the formation era
of solar systems are common, and in computer models,
we see that happens a lot.
Here we've got clues out in the Kuiper Belt
that indicate that's what happened.
That's one of the exciting things
is that we're looking at something
that although it's far from our earth
and far from our common experience,
may actually be important in planetary science,
in other solar systems as well.
(gentle music)