(mysterious music)
Far out near the edge of the solar system
where the sun's light is weak
lies a world that until recently was completely unexplored.
Pluto is the amorous of the solar system,
the farthest and coldest and hardest to reach.
By going to Pluto, we were looking beyond
the known solar system and exploring a whole new world.
This is the story of Pluto's exploration
and what was found there told by those who dared to do it.
We're good?
I need water for answering this question.
Okay, I'll give you my personal opinion on this.
A mission 25 years in the making
attempting to discover our most ancient origins.
This mission represents the spirit of adventure
and discovery and inquiry which is inherent
in the human spirit.
Which is our insatiable desire
to explore the unknown and understand how we fit
into this vast universe.
We have ignition and we have liftoff.
There really is something intrinsic
in humans to want to explore.
(dramatic music)
You can look at it from an evolutionary perspective.
We didn't have the sharpest claws
or the strongest muscles
but we had this ability to invent and explore
and, you know we had curiosity.
That's how we've come to exist all over this planet
and that impulse doesn't stop at earth.
(eerie music)
The exploration of the outer solar system
began in the 1970s.
And in 1977, a pair of spacecrafts called Voyager 1
and Voyager 2 set off to visit
the most distant planets, including Uranus and Neptune.
Voyager 2 was the first to leave Earth.
Five, four, three, two, one,
we have ignition and we have liftoff.
(dramatic music)
(rocket rumbling)
The first of two Voyager spacecrafts
to extend mans' senses farther into the solar system
than ever before.
(suspenseful music)
The mission would fly past Jupiter,
then Saturn before heading for the mysterious outer worlds.
The Voyager mission was an incredible adventure
because it was our first time
to really visit all these worlds and start to get
to know their systems, not just the planets themselves,
but their moons.
Those of us that were involved felt almost as though
we were onboard the spacecraft lookin' out
the little window and the images come up
on the screen and for the first time,
you're seeing these new worlds.
When we first visit these planets, they're fly bys.
You're not going into orbit.
You're not landing.
It's just a very quick visit and you see it approaching
and then all of a sudden there it is
and then it's in the rear view mirror
and you can't stop and you're still going
so there's something about the pace
of discovery that's amazing.
The first pictures of Uranus were a little bit boring
and people were a little worried
about the lack of jazziness.
Uranus is a weird planet.
Instead of spinning, you know,
like we're spinning 23 and a half degrees from vertical,
Uranus is on its side.
Tipped on its side.
Why?
We don't know.
Very strange.
Unlike all the other planets.
Could it have been wanged by something going by,
tipping it over, we don't know.
Systems to control.
Copy.
We see lock up on the green box (mumbles).
September 1989, we're about to arrive at Neptune.
Copy this, thank you.
(dramatic music)
Again, it's sort of cold and dim
but Neptune is really
a little bit more interesting than Uranus.
We see a blue atmosphere.
Dark, deep clouds and then some white clouds above.
So there's a lot more structure than Uranus.
But perhaps the most important thing
about Neptune's system is the big moon, Triton.
We are pretty sure at this point
that Triton formed orbiting the sun just as Pluto did
and somehow early in the solar system,
it got captured into orbit around Neptune.
We saw landscapes like nothing we had ever seen before.
Looked like melted wax.
It was clearly a very active world.
There weren't many craters
so things had been happening very recently.
The most exciting thing and the weird thing that we saw
were black plumes of smoke coming up out of some hole.
(people clapping) (people chattering)
So clearly, there's some geological activity going on here.
(people chattering)
And so Triton just instantly became
this incredibly complex world.
And seeing that which was thought sort of
to be a twin of Pluto, I think got a lot of people thinking,
well, wait a minute, there are other worlds up there.
For many of us, it was now what?
What are we gonna do after Voyager?
Is there life after Voyager?
(upbeat rock music)
I was lucky because a young man called Alan Stone,
he was a graduate student, came up to me
and said what about Pluto?
I think we should go to Pluto.
After Voyager had this smashing success
all the way across the solar system,
the United States Postal Service issued a set of stamps
and on each stamp they featured the spacecraft
and mission that had been first to that planet.
But for Pluto, there had been no exploration
so they had this lame stamp.
And that stamp became a dare
that we should finish this off.
We should make this happen.
We should change this stamp.
I knew there was a chance that in my lifetime,
in my career, we could send a space probe off to Pluto.
What we didn't know is we were embarking
on an adventure that would last most of our careers.
(romantic orchestral music)
This path to Pluto all began with Clyde Tombaugh.
Clyde Tombaugh was an amazing person.
United States was in the grip
of a paralyzing depression.
Millions were unemployed, on some form of relief.
He grew up very poor on a farm in Kansas
during the Depression and as a young kid,
became enthralled with astronomy
and was self taught from the local library.
In 1928, the young farmer built a telescope
using the crank shafts of an old Buick
and pieces of farm equipment.
He dreamed of being an astronomer
but had no plan, no idea how this poor kid
in Depression Era Kansas could ever get off the farm.
Well, I was interested in knowledge
and so, of course I was fascinated with
what I saw in the sky.
(peaceful music)
And so I made drawings of Mars and Jupiter.
Tombaugh sent his drawings off
to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona
who was so impressed by his work
that they offered him a job.
The job was to go off to search for the planet
out beyond Neptune.
For decades, there'd been a theory
about a hidden planet out beyond Neptune.
Percival Lowell, a wealthy businessman and astronomer
had become obsessed with the theory
and spent the latter part of his life searching
for the mysterious planet but never found it.
After his death in 1916, the Lowell Observatory
that he founded continued the search.
They had been tryin' early years to find it
but without any success
and they weren't doin' too thorough a job of it either.
You have to have a very strong mental concentration,
otherwise, you can't let your mind wander.
You've got to be conscious of seein' every star
and see if it shifts.
And that's very demanding.
It was a difficult, painstaking task
with little chance of success.
Tombaugh used the telescope to photograph a tiny patch
of sky onto glass plates.
He studied these images on a special machine
in the hope that he would spot the mysterious planet
as it moved.
But, after searching for nearly a year, he'd found nothing.
Lotta people told him it was futile
and that they would never find it,
people had already looked.
But he was incredibly fastidious.
Then, on February 18th, 1930,
while comparing two photographic plates taken
in late January, six days apart,
he noticed a moving object.
He checked it again.
He photographed the patch of sky a third time.
That's when he realized he had found
a ninth planet beyond Neptune.
And then they announced it to the world.
Well, I think I decided to let the younger men do it now
but I feel quite satisfied with what I did in my lifetime.
Clyde passed away in 1997 and he said,
if a mission to Pluto ever got launched
and there was a way for his ashes
to be flown in the spacecraft,
he would really like that to happen.
There's lots of interesting things we can do.
Perhaps the most important thing is to look at what Voyager
did not do.
It did not visit Pluto.
When we were campaigning for this mission to Pluto,
it was a big establishment, the Voyager types,
the Cassini types, the Galileo types
who were pushing for those really big missions.
What we wanted was a lot smaller.
Just to fly out, take a few pictures of Pluto.
However, there's a political problem
of trying to sell a mission that will have a 14 year cruise
will not return information for 14 years
and when it does,
it'll be a half hour flyby with a handful of pictures.
You're not going to have 11 instruments.
You're not gonna have the data taking capability of Voyager.
But remember those nine pictures of Triton.
(suspenseful music)
We have to cut back our scientific desires to have more
and just send it out and take those pictures.
It was really a group of young scientists
who wanted to ask NASA why aren't we going to the last
of the planets.
And so it was a bit of an underground movement
of people who were pushing for this underdog, Pluto.
So we called ourselves the Pluto Underground.
Our first objective as the Pluto Underground
was to have NASA do a study of how you go about flying
a mission to explore Pluto.
In May of 1989, I went to the top
of the NASA Planetary Exploration Program
to a man named Jeff Briggs and just straight our asked him,
how 'bout a study of how to go explore
the last of the planets.
And to my complete surprise, he smiled
and said, you know, that's a brilliant idea.
No one has ever asked me that before.
I think we should study it.
A study was just the first step
on a very long road to making a mission happen.
The Pluto Underground had to research the idea
and devise a plan that showed
how a mission would actually work.
It's exciting to Mark and I
and to our whole scientific team to be able
to see this object that no humans really
could glimpse as a real planet.
We had no idea how complicated
the political process would be.
We would walk in to one of these meetings
and the NASA representative would say,
okay, this is the mission you're gonna get.
And our job was to justify that mission concept
and most of 'em were absolutely crazy schemes.
Let's do a small mission.
Let's do a grandiose mission.
Let's do a cheap mission.
Let's fly two.
No, we don't wanna do that.
But if we say no, then we're done.
Every year, something came up that prevented us,
that blocked us, that we had to find a way around.
We were close but then we were set back.
We were even closer than we were set back.
And what made it even more difficult
was the feedback that we would get
that you guys really should let go of this.
There must be other things that you're interested in doing.
(upbeat music)
I met Dave as a graduate student
and he was a professor and I needed a project to work on.
And she came to me one day and said,
you know, Dave, the thing I'm working on
is not going that well.
Have you got any ideas?
And I said, yeah, I've been thinkin' about searching
for things beyond Saturn.
And she said, okay, that'll be cool.
Dave pointed out
that the outer solar system seemed rather empty
compared to the inner solar system.
Inside Saturn, inside Jupiter we knew
of lots of asteroids and comets and all the planets
and then beyond Saturn, nothing much is there.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
So he proposed that maybe we should look
in the outer solar system
to see if there were things out there.
Dave and Jane used the Mauna Kea Observatory
here in Hawaii.
Mauna Kea's 14,000 feet high.
It's above most of the clouds.
It's above most of the water vapor
in the atmosphere.
It's the second best place to put a telescope.
First best would be in space.
The telescope are on the peak, 4,000 meters,
it's miserable there because at that level,
the amount of oxygen that you get
is only about 60% of what you get at sea level.
So you don't have enough air to breathe.
The altitude gives me a headache every time.
Sometimes you would get a nosebleed.
Once Jane Luu collapsed from the altitude.
We never found out why but she simply couldn't stand up.
It's painful to work on Mauna Kea
but we put up with it because we understand
that this is the best place to make observations.
Everybody wondered where the cutoff point was.
So many people would say when are you going to stop.
We were looking for things that were not predicted
to exist by any theory.
So we take a series of pictures.
Four pictures, one after the other.
And the stars and the galaxies
which were basically infinitely far away don't move.
But anything in the solar system moves
'cause it's going around the sun
and the speed depends on is distance
and we look for anything that is moving slowly
with respect to the stars and the galaxies.
Every time we wanted to stop,
the technology would get better.
And we knew the technology was improving
because bigger cameras became available to us year by year.
(peaceful music)
At the end of August in 1992,
we took the first picture and it came out
then the second picture came out.
And I pretty much immediately saw this object
that seemed to moved,
and it didn't move much.
And I said to Jane, hey Jane, come and have a look at this
and she said, yeah, that looks good.
We were very excited because it
was the first believable candidate.
So the third picture came and the third picture showed
that same object but a little bit further over
and so we suddenly thought hey,
that's probably the best thing we've ever seen.
After doing thing for ages, for years.
So the fourth image came out
and it was just perfect.
It was bang, bang, bang, bang.
In a straight line going to the west
and during the whole time, we were able to measure it
and its speed was just a beautiful straight line.
How could that possibly be real.
Like, we've done this so much.
And there's just so much rubbish that we get.
How could this possibly be real.
(Jane laughing)
So we just took picture after picture
after picture after picture.
For the remaining six hours of the night.
(dramatic music)
Wow, this changes our view
of the solar system fundamentally
that there's a whole new unexplored area out
there of objects.
It was really clear that this was a major breakthrough.
There are 100,000 objects in the Kuiper belt
bigger than 60 miles across
and there's a billion objects in the Kuiper belt bigger
than about a mile across.
Pluto was not just some weird fringe oddball
by itself out in the outer fringes
of the solar system but in fact was the largest member
of this massive domain of objects
that clearly is important
in the story of how the solar system came to be.
(peaceful music)
The competition was really intense.
Five teams formed and frankly, of the five,
our team was the David in a David and Goliath battle.
We had the least experience
but probably the highest motivation.
No humans really could glimpse as a real planet.
One of the first things that we had to do
was to find a name for it
and when I was on a long run across my hometown,
Boulder, Colorado, and I turned around
to the west and saw the Rocky Mountains
and I thought this is a mission of New Horizons.
And people liked it and that's what we adopted.
We designed our mission as best we could.
Not too much, but not too little.
Just get it right.
These proposals are phone book thick engineering
and technical documents.
There's a lot of work that goes into
putting one of these together.
On November the 29th, 2001,
after 300 days of competition,
I was at a planetary science meeting
and NASA scientist came to me
and said there's a phone call for you.
And I knew at that moment that that phone call
was the decision.
We would find out if we had won or lost.
And I picked up the phone
and time telescoped, it slowed down for me incredibly
and I knew that within moments, my life would change.
One way or the other.
And fortunately the phone call was a good one
and we found out we had won.
(dramatic music)
It was such a huge relief.
We were selected.
It was all systems to go to build the spacecraft
and to make it happen.
David had beat Goliath and we were actually going
to have an opportunity to do something
that had been our ambition for 14 years.
Then they actually have to built it
and make it succeed.
And they're on a ticking clock.
(machine rumbling)
All of the challenges associated
with building a spacecraft that was small enough,
used little enough power that we could perform
when the light levels are so low.
It was just technically very challenging.
Well, you know, the key to planetary science is
that you really have to go places to get the resolution
to get up close enough to really see what's going on.
We wanna get up close and personal.
I was so excited when I had the opportunity
to join this mission.
I had been studying Pluto
for years using ground based telescopes,
trying to understand what was going on in
this fuzzy point of light.
The Hubble Telescope produced the first image
that illuminated Pluto.
This image was made up of just eight pixels.
One pixels per 390 square kilometers of Pluto's surface.
And to be able to have a part in the New Horizons mission
where we got to turn Pluto from a point of light
into a world where we're mapping the surface is amazing.
We were ready for launch.
We had the spacecraft on top of the rocket.
The New Horizons spacecraft is a small spacecraft
and then we put it on the biggest rocket
that we had available from NASA at the time,
the Atlas V.
They put a stamp on there from the U.S. Postal Service
that says "Pluto, not yet explored".
In addition to a small vial of ashes
from the remains of Clyde Tombaugh.
It was my honor to be able to bring it back
to his efforts to actually find the planet.
We had a number of days
where everything's lining up and then somewhere
along the way, somebody said no, can't go.
That got to be the pattern.
11, 10, nine, eight, seven,
six, five.
I remember on that one day,
the clock's counting down and it's getting lower
and lower and they're not stopping
and I said wow if they don't stop this,
it's actually, they're gonna have to send it off.
Six, five, four, three, two, one.
We have ignition.
(woman cheering)
(uplifting music)
And sure enough that thing took off
like nobody's business.
We had a picture perfect launch.
At 11:00 p.m. I was out on the balcony
of the hotel where I was staying in Cape Canaveral.
Just looking up and seeing the beautiful bright moon
and the spacecraft was passing, you know,
at the orbit of the moon at that time already.
I mean, usually, it took the Apollo astronauts three days
to get there.
So we knew we were speeding on to our destination.
Flying past Jupiter allowed us
to check out our instruments.
New Horizons flew by Jupiter and took advantage
of a particular trick called a gravity assist.
So if you imagine Jupiter moving along
and New Horizons is catching up to it
and Jupiter pulls it forward
and then bends the orbit and as they keep goin',
that interchange will add a little bit more velocity
to the speed of New Horizons.
Spacecraft is outward bound from Jupiter
and we're on our way to Pluto.
All right.
(people clapping)
We shaved a couple of years off the flight time
but it was still a very long haul.
It was another eight years from there to Pluto.
So they pioneered this technique of hibernation
where you put the spacecraft to sleep first
for a day and then for a week
and then for weeks.
Which makes a lot of sense because if you think
of the wear and tear
on all the components, it's more likely to be working
after nine years if it's been off most of the time.
And it's just sending back a beacon, a beep.
(spacecraft beeps)
(upbeat music)
Pluto is a planet.
I wanna know that if it really is a planet
or if it's just something else in space.
There is this issue about what a planet should
or shouldn't be and whether Pluto was one.
I don't think it's a planet, I really don't.
There's a bunch of objects like that out there
so how did that get to be a planet, you know?
Didn't seen right to call Pluto a planet
when there were like thousands of other objects like it.
It's a big Kuiper belt object
but it's a Kuiper belt object,
there's no doubt about that.
And so the astronomers had a vote.
A vote is ludicrous in itself.
They had a vote on whether Pluto
was a planet and the idea of voting in science,
it just crazy.
Since when do we vote about scientific fact?
In the scientific community, most planetary scientists
simply ignore it.
To me, it wasn't a big deal.
I knew Pluto was an amazing place
and I couldn't wait to see it
and what we called it was pretty secondary.
Dwarf people are people, dwarf planets are planets.
Because it's a flyby mission,
we knew we were gonna get a really good shot
at one half of Pluto.
The other half we would see it but it would be blurry.
One of the projects I worked on was
to take images with the Hubble Space Telescope.
And figured out a map
but Pluto was so far away and so tiny
that even with Hubble, it's very, very difficult
to get any information.
It took about six or seven years worth
of computer processing to get the maps up.
I think this map is probably the best,
the best map we're gonna get prior
to the spacecraft getting there.
I said here's the deal.
I can tell ya right now where you need to go.
There's one patch of Pluto that's the brightest part
of the body.
Right next to it is one of the darkest areas
on the entire surface.
You're gonna see the darkest stuff,
you're gonna see the brightest stuff
and you're gonna see the contact in between
and then all the northern polar areas.
On July the fourth, 2015,
New Horizons had been journeying towards Pluto
for over nine years.
It was now just 10 days from reaching the planet.
As the country celebrated Independence Day,
Alice Bowman, the mission operation manager
was in mission control,
preparing to upload the main flyby sequence
that would direct New Horizons towards Pluto.
There are a number of gates that we go through
when we establish communications with the spacecraft.
You know, you see the first gate locked.
The second gate locked.
The third gate locked
and that's when you get your telemetry.
But at 1:54 in the afternoon,
their worst fears came true.
We went out of lock.
The next one went out of lock
and then we lost the last one out of lock.
I got a phone call from our project manager,
saying something I almost couldn't process the words for.
He said to me, Alan, we've lost contact with the spacecraft.
I had people that were very upset
that I needed to calm down and have them focus
'cause I needed their expertise.
Just over an hour later
at 11 minutes past three in the afternoon,
the team reestablished communication with New Horizons.
But the problems were far from over.
The spacecraft reports on its status
and it was bad news.
The spacecraft had overloaded a computer memory
and rebooted itself
while this uplink was happening of core commands
for the encounter sequence
and all of that software was lost.
The team had just three days
to rewrite the flyby sequence and upload it
to the spacecraft.
Otherwise New Horizons would miss Pluto.
This is the fourth of July
and everybody was takin' the holiday off.
So people start showing up there in mission control
in their bathing suits and flip flops.
We knew that if we could not fix this problem
that everything we had invested
in the previous 26 years, all of that, was for nothing
unless we could fix the problem.
So, it was necessary to reboot the computer
and then start rewriting some of that software
and finding the right files
and reloading those core sequences.
But that process took time.
It takes nine hours just to say hey are you okay?
(suspenseful music)
You know, nine hours later,
the spacecraft goes yeah, I'm here, what should I do.
Well all felt that sense of a ticking clock.
People were sleeping on desks,
people were sleeping on the floor
and eating out of candy machines.
This is our mission.
We have flown nine and a half years
and none of us were going to give up.
None of us.
After three grueling days,
the team waited for New Horizons to respond
and find out if they'd saved the mission.
(woman mumbles)
We saw that the spacecraft had transitioned
into that mode to accomplish the flyby
and it was pretty amazing.
Our team rose to that occasion with no preparation
and saved the day.
With the flyby sequence initiated,
New Horizons turned towards Pluto.
When people ask me what my favorite picture is
of the Pluto system, it's that blurry picture,
the first one that comes down on July seventh.
That's a representation of what we had accomplished
and what we were going to accomplish.
It's one of those moments that you will never forget
in your whole life.
I had been working my entire career,
leading up to this moment of time.
Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four,
three, two, one!
(people cheering)
On July 14th, 2015,
New Horizons signaled to Earth
that it had successfully flown by Pluto.
But the team had to wait nine more hours
due to the vast distance between Earth and Pluto
to find out if they'd achieved their goal
of photographing this far off world.
(melancholy music)
So there we were at Johns Hopkins applied physics lab
with all the press and the family and friends
and a whole bunch of people who were just dying to know
what Pluto's like.
When we finally get that image down
and we displayed it on the monitor, it was unbelievable.
(people clapping)
The whole team was like aghast at this beautiful image.
(people cheering)
(uplifting music)
In 1989, a small team
of young scientists took it upon themselves
to campaign for a mission to Pluto.
We have to just send it out and take those pictures.
To be able to see this object
that no humans really could glimpse.
Over two and half decades later,
they had achieved their goal
and made one the most unique discoveries
in the history of space travel.
It was just extraordinary.
This was a whole new world.
Just as Voyager had revealed Neptune's moon,
Triton, New Horizons images showed a world
that was geologically active.
We began to see all of these features.
Mountains and ravines and glaciers
and all sorts of indications of activity
and physics taking place on the surface.
It just blew us away.
(peaceful music)
Pluto has mountains.
But these aren't ordinary mountains.
These are mountains of ice, water ice,
that are sticking up, the size of the Rockies.
Huge, big mountains.
And Pluto, as Alan is always saying,
is the Everest of the solar system.
The farthest and coldest and hardest to reach.
And so these mountain ranges were named Norgay
and Hillary after the original explorers of Everest.
Many of the features on Pluto were named
after famous explorers and famous vessels of exploration.
As we were flying up to Pluto and imaging it,
day after day and week after week on approach,
we could see this bright feature on the surface.
(dramatic music)
One morning, we got an image back
and as soon as it came up on the big screen,
I remember a NASA official who said,
do you see that looks like a heart?
And as we got closer and closer,
amazingly, it looked more and more like a heart.
I think that's what emblazoned Pluto into the public mind
as this amazing place at the frontier
of our solar system.
Pluto's heart measures 1,600 kilometers across
and is composed of nitrogen ice.
We believe that structure might be supported by water
underneath the surface.
There could be an ocean underneath Pluto's surface.
There probably is some kind of liquid water ocean.
It's very deep down inside but we think
there's a pretty good chance that it's there.
It's one of those things where if you find water,
is there a chance for life?
Wouldn't that be cool if Pluto's actually one
of those places in the solar system that has
or had life on it, even out at the outer reaches
of the solar system.
That's just mind blowing right there.
(dramatic music)
(peaceful music)
When we flew behind and we looked at the sun
go behind Pluto,
we saw this big ring of blue sky,
a haze in the upper atmosphere.
New Horizons continued further
into the Kuiper belt.
And three and a half year later
on New Years' Day 2019,
it reached a small Kuiper belt object
officially named Arrokoth.
With the spacecraft now a billion miles
farther out than Pluto,
here was this fantastically complex object.
It's in a very special category of objects
out in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune.
These are objects we call the cold classical objects.
These are objects that are in very flat, circular orbits
that are all traveling around the sun pretty much parallel
to each other, they very rarely run into each other.
And they clearly have been in these orbits
since the formation of the solar system.
That's the only way they can have such undisturbed orbit.
These are the building blocks of solar system formation.
They're the things that didn't get accreted
into the giant planets and the terrestrial planets
so they're the leftovers out in the deep freeze
of our solar system.
(peaceful music)
The images reveal that Arrakoth
is made up of two objects that are joined together.
This can't be done
without a very, very, very slow merging of the two objects.
Realizing, all right, this is how you make planets.
You have to take small objects
and bring them together gently
so they will stick.
And won't just smash each other to pieces
and so you can build up things into larger objects
and eventually end up with things the size of the Earth.
And here we were seeing that process
for the first time in a real object
that had been frozen in the early stages of that process.
Super exciting to be able to take science
by leaps and bounds just from a short period of time
where we're getting data.
(melancholy music)
The outpouring of interest was an amazing thing to see
and just goes to show that this kind of exploration
can really bring people together no matter
where you are in the world.
(people cheering)
I don't think words can really capture how much
this mission means and how much of an effect
it has had on my life.
Do what you're passionate about.
Don't do something because it's easy.
This was something for the post Voyager generation
that they could say they were there
just like the previous generations could say
they saw the first landing on the moon
or the first flyby of Jupiter or Saturn
or Uranus or Neptune.
This was their first.
We've opened up a new realm of the solar system.
A new realm of human discovery.
A half century long endeavor
that will forever be a legacy of our time.
We changed the world a little bit for the better.
And we made a little something called history.
(uplifting music)
There is no end to the discoveries that we can make
out here in the solar system.
We are just getting started.
I gave lots of talks to the public
and I've been to many schools
and it inspires young people to study science.
(people cheering)
When you have a dream, something in your heart,
you should follow your heart.
I never grew up thinking that I would
be a part of something like that but now looking back,
I realize everyday people make history.