The Planetary Society Weblog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Looking Forward to New Horizons' Launch with John Spencer
Dec. 28, 2005 | 10:32 PST | 18:32 UTC
The following was sent to me by John Spencer, who introduces himself below. John will be sending me periodic updates on his perspective on the approaching launch of New Horizons, and I will post them here as I get them. I hope that you enjoy reading them as much as I will! --ESL
 Hi, this is John Spencer, one of the members of the science team on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Emily asked me to report in from time to time as the long-awaited launch of our spacecraft approaches, to provide another perspective on this exciting mission.
For the last two years I've been a staff scientist at Southwest Research Institute's Department of Space Studies in downtown Boulder, Colorado -- the research group founded by New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern a decade ago. For twelve years prior to my move to Boulder I was an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where this whole story started back in 1930, with Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of our target planet. I've been working off and on on some version of the Pluto mission since 1993, when Alan invited me to join a team designing a multi-wavelength camera/spectrometer (grandfather of the Ralph and Alice instruments now sitting on top of a rocket in Florida) for one of NASA's earlier Pluto mission concepts. So Pluto has been part of my life for a long time.
At the moment, though, my New Horizons work has little to do with Pluto itself. I'm helping to plan the observations we'll make as we fly past Jupiter in 2007 on our way to Pluto (assuming, as we all hope, we launch early enough to use a Jupiter flyby to speed us on our way to our prime target). I'm also working with Marc Buie at Lowell Observatory, and a team of Japanese astronomers, to find one or more Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) that New Horizons can fly past in the years after its Pluto flyby. For the launch itself, like most of the science team, I'm really just a tourist. The engineers, the real heroes of this and every space mission, are in charge for this most critical stage of the proceedings.
Right now my mind is on Pluto's cousins in the Kuiper Belt. I'm sitting in the control room of the 72" telescope back at Lowell Observatory, beginning the first of the night's long exposures on a KBO called 1998 SM165. Despite lacking a catchy name, it's a fascinating beast because it's one of the brightest and nearest KBOs (other than Pluto itself) that's known to have a satellite. From the satellite's orbit we have learned SM165's mass, and in a couple of weeks we'll be using the amazing sensitivity of the Spitzer Space Telescope to measure the KBO's feeble heat radiation and thus deduce its size. Combining those two numbers, we'll be able to determine SM165's density and thus learn valuable clues about what SM165 (and by cautious extrapolation, KBOs in general) might be made of. Here on the ground tonight, I'm measuring SM165's rotation by watching it brighten and fade as it tumbles end over end. From this we'll be able to tell how the KBO is oriented when Spitzer makes its measurements in January, and this will help us make sense of the Spitzer data.
So we keep chipping away at the wonderfully rich puzzles of the Kuiper Belt using all the tools at our disposal, from the 80-year-old telescope in the dome next door, to the Spitzer Space Telescope drifting two years out from Earth, to our tiny golden spaceship now awaiting its big moment at Cape Canaveral.
Thanks for the update, John! I and very many onlookers throughout the world are keeping our fingers crossed for a flawless launch! --ESL
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