SUMMARY: On this New Year’s Day, NASA has a special reason to celebrate: Its spacecraft New Horizons has made a successful flyby of Ultima Thule, an object orbiting in space about four billion miles from Earth. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Jeffrey Brown to explain the immense difficulty of this mission and its larger significance for the U.S. space program.
SUMMARY: Soon, some of the mystery surrounding Pluto, the distant dwarf planet, will be lifted. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, speeding through space for almost a decade on a mission to capture a myriad of data, is believed to have finally made a successful Pluto flyby. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Ready or not, it is finally time for Pluto’s closeup. Once a full-fledged planet, now considered something less, it remains an intriguing mystery 85 years after its discovery, but not for long. The picture is growing clearer as a fast-moving spacecraft arrives at the solar system’s underdog.
ALAN STERN, New Horizons Principal Investigator: It was always the planet with the little question marks everywhere. We didn’t know anything. And because it’s the last in the public mind, it takes a special place.
MILES O’BRIEN: Pluto has taken a special place in planetary scientist Alan Stern’s mind since 1988. That’s when he first began pushing NASA to send a spacecraft to what was then the ninth planet in our solar system.
The three-billion-mile journey of the New Horizons spacecraft began in 2006. It left the Earth faster than any spacecraft ever, making a beeline for Pluto, getting a gravitational kick from Jupiter as it bulleted past, snapping pictures all the while. And now, after nearly a decade in space, New Horizons is finally there.
HAL WEAVER, New Horizons Project Scientist: I like to call this a mission of delayed gratification, because it takes nine-and-a-half years to get all the way out to Pluto, but we’re almost there. And the opportunity to transform Pluto from a little pixelated blob into a world with complexity and diversity is just going to be amazing.
SUMMARY: Today, NASA released the first ever close-up photographs of Pluto. The images showed icy mountains and a mysterious pale patch shaped like a heart. Judy Woodruff speaks to science correspondent Miles O’Brien about what we have learned about Pluto so far.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
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