Pluto, a tiny dwarf planet
in the far reaches of our solar system,
has set the world of astronomy alight.
We were expecting it to be dead, frozen, just sitting there,
and what we saw was completely the opposite.
Pluto is bursting with drama...
Soaring mountains, flowing glaciers,
and churning, icy plains.
You have to understand how profound this is.
No had no expectation that Pluto would be alive.
More than that, we don't know how it's possible.
Today, investigators race to unravel
this strange planet's dark secrets.
Do alien volcanoes cover its surface?
Is its mysterious heart-shaped plain evidence
of a giant impact?
And is Pluto’s biggest moon, Charon, a cosmic thief?
The new horizons' observations of Pluto
are like a giant detective story...
The clues are all there,
and now we need to unravel its mysteries.
We dive deep inside this icy world
to reveal Pluto’s mysterious hidden history.
Captions by vitac... www.vitac.com
captions paid for by discovery communications
Investigators across the globe are trying to solve
one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy...
Why a tiny world at the edge of our solar system
appears to seethe with geological life.
From earth, Pluto is barely visible...
Three, two, one...
so NASA launches the new horizons space probe
on a 3.1 billion mile voyage to examine it up close
for the very first time.
And as we sent new horizons on its approach to Pluto,
that little faint dot became this stunning, profound,
remarkable world with a complexity
that we could've never imagined.
New horizons team member Cathy Olkin
follows every step of this space probe's journey
here at mission control.
This was the best image that we had of Pluto
before the spacecraft got there in 2015,
and you can see there's really no detail.
It's blurry.
You can't see any surface features.
It's just a blob.
After nine years of travel,
new horizons takes the first ever
high-resolution images of Pluto’s surface.
What it reveals stuns the world.
When I first saw this image,
I was delighted and I was amazed.
This detail on Pluto far exceeded anything that
I thought we'd see.
Before new horizons, Pluto was a complete mystery.
Since new horizons, Pluto is an even bigger mystery.
There's so much going on on Pluto’s surface
that one image alone,
it's a lifetime's worth of work to understand it.
3.7 billion miles from the sun,
scientists expect Pluto to be a cold, dead,
heavily cratered world.
What they find is astonishing.
Nitrogen freezes out the atmosphere,
coating the land in a thick frost.
Mountain ranges tower above.
And clues hint that the presence of a liquid ocean below.
But Pluto’s most striking feature is a vast,
smooth heart on its surface where massive nitrogen glaciers
slowly flow into a deep, icy basin.
Mountain ranges...
Smooth plains...
Flowing glaciers...
All suggest that Pluto is geologically active.
But how is that possible so far from the sun?
We had never seen Pluto up close,
so we had a certain set of expectations.
It's out there at the edge of the solar system,
it's not receiving much light from the sun,
so we expected it to be a dead, icy world
probably covered by craters.
Well, it turned out to be anything but.
What could be causing Pluto’s active geology?
Investigators start with Pluto’s most striking feature...
Its giant, heart-shaped, nitrogen ice glacier.
They name the western lobe Sputnik Planitia,
but sputnik Planitia is a mystery.
It's far smoother than scientists expect.
Our solar system is filled with speeding asteroids and comets.
These smash into planets and leave their scars behind.
Sputnik Planitia should be covered in these scars,
but it's smooth, as if some mysterious force
is healing the surface, but what?
At NASA Ames research center in California,
Dr. Orkan Umurhan believes the weird material
that makes up the plain is key.
So, on the earth, nitrogen exists in gaseous form
and makes up 70% of the atmosphere,
and that's because it's really warm on the earth,
but on Pluto, because it's so cold,
all that nitrogen exists in the form of ice.
Nitrogen ice flows on to the lowland plain
from vast glaciers that surround sputnik Planitia,
but then the ice does something very unusual...
It forms a strange pattern.
Could these shapes be a clue
to what's wiping out the craters?
All that ice makes its way into sputnik Planitia,
and when you do a close-up
and you zoom in on sputnik Planitia,
you see honeycomb patterns all over that place.
Surprisingly, Orkan thinks this pattern
is something we've all seen before in everyday life.
A few days after the close encounter with Pluto,
we had hauled on out to a Japanese restaurant,
and they brought out the miso soup,
and I looked in the miso soup, and I was like, "oh my god,
it's the same patterns that we see on sputnik Planitia."
Orkan replicates this effect in the lab
by heating miso soup.
The churning patterns that appear on bowls of hot liquid
are called convection cells.
Convection occurs when hot liquid rises
from the bottom of a deep container
and cool liquid sinks down from the surface.
This rising and falling creates
and a patchwork of honeycomb cells on the surface,
just like the patterns on sputnik Planitia.
So, what we're seeing is the patterns
that that's forming in the fluid
and they're remarkably similar to the patterns that you see
on Pluto’s sputnik Planitia.
Orkan thinks the nitrogen ice
in sputnik Planitia acts like a slow-motion liquid.
The faint heat of the planet's interior drives pockets
of warm ice upwards, creating the weird pattern
and wiping out any craters on the surface.
So you can imagine, you get this giant convection-cell pattern
where it's like a conveyor belt
going around in a circle like this.
Miso soup helps to solve the mystery
of the honeycomb pattern,
but it also reveals something extraordinary
about sputnik Planitia.
Convection needs a very deep body of fluid to be effective.
What scientists first thought was a plain
must really be a basin of ice as deep as the Atlantic ocean.
But how could such a vast basin form?
The leading theory suggests that four billion years ago,
a space rock more than 60 miles across drifts into Pluto’s path.
It smashes into the crust,
blasting out a colossal scar 620 miles wide
and 5 1/2 miles deep.
Nitrogen from the atmosphere
condenses on the lowest-lying parts of the crater
and settles as frost, filling in the depression.
Over billions of years, the nitrogen ice churns away
to create the honeycomb pattern we see today.
A giant impact solves the mystery
of Pluto’s honeycomb heart.
But not all of sputnik Planitia seems to play by the same rules.
The lower edges of this vast plain
are just as smooth as the insides,
but there's no sign of convection cells here.
Do the fringes of sputnik Planitia
have a very different self-healing superpower?
And could Pluto’s mysterious mountains actually be volcanoes
made from solid ice?
Pluto's iconic heart, sputnik Planitia,
is a giant basin filled with nitrogen ice.
It should be covered in asteroid craters,
like the rest of the planet,
but something is smoothing it out.
Honeycomb convection cells account for most
of the smoothing, but not all.
At the Southern edges of sputnik Planitia,
the ice is still smooth,
but there's no sign of any convection.
What we suppose is that the basin in this area
is too shallow for convection to take place.
On Pluto, temperatures drop to a frigid
minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Orkan suspects this makes the nitrogen ice
behave in a very unusual way.
He thinks that the ice could be self-healing.
To test his ideas, Orkan runs a computer simulation
of sputnik Planitia to see how nitrogen ice flows
at Pluto’s freezing temperatures.
We start the process, and you can see that the nitrogen ice,
under its own weight, smoothes itself out.
Orkan's simulation reveals that at Pluto’s
temperatures, the nitrogen ice in sputnik Planitia can flow.
It has the consistency of molten candle wax.
This means when an asteroid hits it,
something astonishing happens.
An asteroid pierces Pluto’s atmosphere
and strikes the left lobe of its heart.
It blasts out an enormous crater.
The thick, partially frozen nitrogen
that coats the damaged surface begins to flow.
The nitrogen ice on the crater walls flows down into the crater
and the sides and bottom of the crater push inwards and upwards.
The scar shrinks until it disappears completely,
leaving sputnik Planitia smooth, as if nothing ever happened.
Well, it's really pretty amazing when you think about an ice
that kind of behaves like candle wax and that it's able
to heal itself in a really short period of time.
That's not something that normally comes to mind,
but it's happening today on a place like Pluto.
But Pluto’s remarkable heart-shaped basin
isn't its only surprising feature.
High-resolution images reveal an enormous mountain,
93 miles across and 2 1/2 miles high,
with a cavernous crater at its summit.
Cathy Olkin is one of the first to spot this mysterious object.
This is another amazing feature on Pluto,
and it's quite mysterious.
We don't know for sure what it is,
but it sure looks a lot like a volcano.
How could volcanoes be possible on a world so cold
that water sets as hard as rock and nitrogen settles as frost?
Pluto is so small and so far from the sun that we expected it
to be frozen all the way through.
Probably one of the last things you would expect to see
on the surface would be a volcano.
So what forces create volcanoes
at such freezing temperatures?
Mission scientist will Grundy investigates this mystery.
This is the highest resolution color image
that we got of Pluto’s surface.
So, this feature on Pluto really looks like a volcano.
It's an enormous uplift with a big central pit,
and it's comparable in size
to the largest volcanoes here on earth.
If these features are volcanic,
they must be formed by lava,
but on Pluto, there is no rock on the surface to melt.
Below Pluto’s nitrogen-ice frosting lies a bedrock
of water ice, frozen hard as granite.
Is the lava that builds Pluto’s volcanoes simply molten ice?
The problem is, Pluto is so cold.
It's way, way, way below the freezing point of ice,
so it's gonna take a lot of energy to melt it.
Pluto is too cold even for water ice to melt into lava.
Will has an idea.
He thinks that naturally forming chemicals
may lower the freezing point of the water,
acting as an anti-freeze.
This could turn Pluto’s water ice into a thick,
gloopy substance called cryolava.
One could imagine liquid water,
helped by having these anti-freeze ingredients in it,
spewing out of a place like this and freezing
as it settles to the ground or flowing across the surface.
Will wants to find out which special chemicals
allow water to become cryolava at Pluto’s temperatures.
He mixes water with two anti-freeze ingredients,
ammonia and alcohol,
and cools the mixture down with liquid nitrogen.
Water usually freezes solid at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Will cools his mixture more than
70 degrees below the freezing point.
Normal water would be frozen, and it's still liquid,
but that's not cold enough, I want to go colder,
so I'm gonna add a little bit more nitrogen.
The water mix remains a liquid,
but it starts to thicken,
giving it a similar consistency to lava we see on earth,
but instead of being hot, this cryolava is extremely cold.
Amazingly, new horizons finds evidence
for these exactly anti-freeze chemicals during its fly-by.
These two types of anti-freeze, ammonia and alcohol,
have both been detected in the Pluto system.
Will thinks this liquid could be just like
the cryolava that erupts on Pluto.
If this kind of material were to erupt
to the surface of Pluto, it would flow across the surface,
forming a very thick flow, much like lava flows on earth.
As this super-cold cryolava flows across
the surface, it freezes solid, making a thick, icy deposit
almost identical to rocky lava flows on earth.
Will's shown how water can form a gloopy lava
at Plato's temperatures,
but lava alone isn't enough to build volcanoes
the size of the monsters we see on Pluto.
What makes Pluto’s volcanoes so high?
The dwarf planet Pluto
is finally giving up its secrets.
Unprecedented images from the new horizons probe
stun the world.
Today, scientists race to piece together the clues to understand
how this tiny world so far from the sun
can be so geologically active.
Nothing about Pluto seems to make sense.
This should be a cold, dead little body,
and yet we find giant volcanoes, ice volcanoes
that are as much as 100 across, and when you think about how big
that is compared to this tiny body,
you realize that Pluto has some of the largest volcanoes
in the solar system in proportion
to the size of the world.
On earth, heat and pressure from the planet's
scorching interior Wells up and drives volcanoes.
But Pluto’s tiny size means internal heat
is hard to come by.
There's so little energy available
that it would be kind of hard to explain a lot of molten water
coming up out of the ground.
So what makes Pluto’s volcanoes so high?
A clue comes from earth's largest volcanoes.
Gasses dissolved in the lava supercharge eruptions.
This makes the volcanoes grow like they're on steroids.
Could dissolved gas be supercharging
Pluto’s cryolava, too?
The clues all point to an amazing revelation.
Deep inside Pluto, a subsurface ocean of liquid water
must surround the rocky core.
Radioactive material in the core generates heat,
which gently warms up the gas-rich ocean above.
As the water warms, it expands and rises.
Gassy bubbles erupt out of the solution,
forcing the anti-freeze-filled water
to spew out on to the surface.
As the water spreads, it gradually freezes,
building enormous volcanoes that tower more than
2.5 miles above the surface.
Will believes that gassy cryolava
is the secret ingredient in Pluto’s enormous volcanoes.
By just adding simple ingredients,
anti-freeze and dissolved gasses, to water,
we can turn it into an explosive volcano-building material,
so really, even though the ingredients are different,
the mechanisms are very similar for making volcanoes on Pluto
and the way we build volcanoes on earth.
The whole concept of what a volcano is in principle
is the same but in reality is incredibly different.
It's like something out of Sci-Fi.
But Pluto’s active features
aren't the only mystery scientists want to solve.
As new horizons flies past Pluto,
it takes the planet's temperature.
The result is a huge surprise.
Pluto is so far from the sun that it is really cold,
but what's weird is that it's colder than we expected.
Something is chilling Pluto.
It means that there must've been something preventing it from
soaking up the sun's rays to the degree that we thought
it would, and what is that something?
It's been a real mystery,
and it's been a really exciting discovery.
What could be cooling Pluto down?
New horizons reveals a clue...
Pluto has an atmosphere,
and it's one weirdest we've ever seen.
This is one of the most amazing images of Pluto.
It could only be gotten from the spacecraft after we passed by.
What we're doing is, we're looking at Pluto
and we're seeing its atmosphere back-lit by the sun,
so the sun and the earth and everything we know
is on the other side of this image.
The team notices Pluto’s atmosphere
has a strange appearance.
It's split into separate layers of haze.
Hazes are solid particles that hang suspended in the air,
like dust in a sandstorm.
Somehow Pluto is finding a way
to turn the gas in its atmosphere
into solid haze particles, but how?
We didn't know when we got to Pluto whether there'd be
an atmosphere at all.
One of the ideas was that the atmosphere
would've completely collapsed onto Pluto’s surface,
and yet, when we got there, there was this
wonderful atmosphere made of different layers and of hazes,
and a wonder to behold.
What are these hazes?
And can they explain why Pluto is so cold?
One scientist is about to find out.
In a lab at Johns Hopkins university,
planetary scientist Sarah Horst is about to recreate
Pluto’s atmosphere to investigate
how its mysterious hazes form.
We tried to put together an experiment
that is as similar as possible
to what's happening in Pluto’s atmosphere.
Sarah suspects that sunlight triggers
chemical reactions inside Pluto’s atmosphere,
turning gasses into tiny, solid haze particles.
To test this theory, she fills a chamber with methane,
nitrogen, and carbon monoxide...
The main constituents of Pluto’s atmosphere.
She then subjects these gasses to high-energy plasma
to replicate the sun's energy.
Sunlight actually drives the chemistry
in Pluto’s atmosphere, so the light that comes
from the sun, the very energetic parts of it,
can actually break apart the molecules.
That's the starting process for the chemistry
that results in a bunch of different molecules
and eventually the haze particles
that we see in Pluto’s atmosphere.
Sunlight rips into the methane, carbon monoxide,
and nitrogen molecules.
It breaks them down into their smaller parts,
including carbon atoms.
The carbon atoms then link together
to form solid particles.
Scientists call these haze particles organic molecules.
Sarah's organic molecules turn out to be a deep, dark red.
The solid material that we have collected,
like we see here in this vial,
is something that we call "tholin,"
which is just a catch-all term for anything that has a bunch
of complicated organic molecules in it.
One of the thing's that's really exciting about seeing
this type of material on Pluto
is that we didn't necessarily think
that it was possible for this to happen at Pluto,
because it's so far away from the sun.
There's very little sunlight, required to drive the chemistry,
that gets to Pluto.
Sarah's experiment proves that the sun
drives Pluto’s weird hazes,
and it also sheds light on why Pluto is colder than expected.
Because for a distant world like Pluto,
organic hazes act like cosmic sunscreen.
These particles in Pluto’s atmosphere
do two things.
First, they're actually pretty good at absorbing light
that's coming from the sun, but they're also really good
at radiating that energy back to space, and in doing so,
they actually act to cool Pluto’s atmosphere overall.
Sarah's work shows why Pluto is colder
than it should be, but it also uncovers a deeper mystery...
Why so much of Pluto is stained red.
As the sun continues to build haze particles,
they grow bigger and heavier
until the atmosphere can't hold on to them any longer.
These red organic molecules fall towards the surface of Pluto
where they settle, staining the ice its distinctive color.
It's amazing to think that there's even pink snow,
organic snow, falling on Pluto right now.
Pluto is not alone in having unusual red markings.
New horizons images reveal that Pluto’s giant moon
Charon has a red-staining, too.
Unlike Pluto, which is covered in red patches,
Charon, at first, appears to only have one large spot,
on its north pole, but this poses a problem.
Charon doesn't have an atmosphere,
so what causes its red spot?
There's absolutely nothing like
the Pluto-Charon system anywhere else in the solar system.
Charon is a giant moon compared to the size of its planet,
and they orbit very, very close to each other,
and it shouldn't be surprising that maybe these two worlds
actually interact in different ways.
Could Charon’s red spot have started life
on nearby Pluto?
One of the things that's really interesting
that we discovered from new horizons
is that it seems like some of the methane
from Pluto’s atmosphere actually ends up on Charon.
But how can Charon steal Pluto’s atmosphere.
Sarah has a theory.
She thinks a similar process happens in her lab
when air encounters something extremely cold.
Right now, this metal line is filling
with liquid nitrogen and because of that the metal
is getting extremely cold,
and so what's happening right now is that the metal
is actually pulling water out of earth's atmosphere
and it's condensing on to the metal surface,
forming something kind of like snow.
Molecules from Pluto’s atmosphere
are somehow freezing out on Charon’s chilly pole,
but how is this possible when the two bodies
are almost 12,500 miles apart?
Scientists are forced to consider
an extraordinary possibility.
As solar wind rushes through the far reaches of our solar system,
it collides with Pluto’s thin atmosphere.
It strips away the methane and nitrogen
and carries them from Pluto as a thin,
wispy tail into the path of Charon’s orbit.
When the tail hits Charon’s chilly polar region,
the methane freezes out and settles,
just like water vapor condensing on Sarah's cold lab pipes.
Sunlight then slams into this stolen carbon-rich ice cap,
kick-starting the production of complex organic molecules,
and staining Charon’s pole a deep, dark red.
Charon's actually taking the methane away from Pluto
in the same way that this cold pipe
is pulling the water out of earth's atmosphere
and keeping it there as long as it stays cold.
This is a stunning possibility.
It's the first time astronomers have ever seen two worlds
in our solar system sharing an atmosphere.
Pluto is literally donating its atmosphere
to the surface of its moon.
The interaction between Pluto and Charon
is just one more example of how Pluto
is rewriting our rule book.
Astronomers are piecing together Pluto’s
true nature, but there remains many unsolved mysteries.
Can Pluto’s mega seasons help explain
its mysterious river channels?
New horizons' observation of Pluto’s
atmosphere delivers an incredible discovery,
but it also provides one of the hardest mysteries to solve.
New horizons scientists spot
some striking features on Pluto’s surface
which look like they've been carved by raging liquid.
This is another example of the bizarre features
that we see on Pluto’s surface.
You can see these long channels here.
So these are deep valley networks on Pluto.
These valleys are similar
to river channels we see on earth,
but Pluto is the last place you'd expect to find rivers.
Planets need thick atmospheres to stop surface liquids
from boiling away into space,
and Pluto’s atmosphere is too thin.
To prove this, will Grundy fills a chamber with methane gas
and cools it to form a liquid.
I'm letting methane into the cell here
by bleeding it in through this valve.
But will keeps the pressure artificially high.
So we have liquid in the cell, but it's a pressure that's
much higher than the surface pressure on Pluto,
so we'll drop the pressure to Pluto’s surface pressure
and see if this liquid is stable.
As will drops the pressure to Pluto levels,
the still-cold liquid begins to boil away.
So, if you take any of the ices
that we know about on the surface of Pluto
and melt them individually, they'll form a liquid,
but that liquid will not be stable at the low pressures
that are prevalent on the surface of Pluto.
It's impossible for Pluto’s current atmosphere
to support liquids on the surface,
so how did the channels get there?
It's possible that at some time in the ancient past,
Pluto had a much thicker atmosphere
and much warmer liquids
could've flowed across the surface.
Pluto's long seasons may trigger a dramatic change
in its atmosphere.
Pluto's atmosphere varies with the seasons,
and it varies quite a bit, unlike earth's atmosphere
which is pretty constant.
Pluto has an extreme elliptical orbit
and a huge 120-degree tilt.
This means that as Pluto travels around the sun,
the amount of sunlight hitting the surface changes
dramatically at different stages of Pluto’s orbit.
This causes massive temperature swings.
During the summer, sunlight heats the ice.
The vaporizing ice feeds the atmosphere,
making it a little bit thicker,
but not thick enough to support rivers.
Then, just once every 3 million years,
something spectacular happens.
Pluto's tilt and orbit align to create a series of mega summers.
If it's pointing pole on to the sun, it's just getting cooked,
and if that happens to coincide with
when Pluto is at its closest to the sun,
it's really getting cooked.
The constant barrage of sunlight heats the surface
enough to completely transform the dwarf planet.
As Pluto moves into its mega-summer cycle,
sunlight cooks the surface.
Nitrogen ice evaporates in the newfound warmth,
making the atmosphere so thick, exotic mixtures of ices
on the surface begin to melt and rivers start to flow,
carving deep channels into the surface.
When summer fades,
the atmosphere thins and the rivers boil away,
leaving the empty channels behind.
It all points to the idea that maybe the temperatures
and pressures were high enough to support a liquid
on the surface, and that's incredible.
Pluto is cold and a long way from the sun...
The idea that liquid could've ever been on its surface
is just mind-boggling.
Perhaps in a few million years,
when the next mega-summer cycle kicks in,
future generations of planetary explorers
will find a world with valleys filled
with flowing liquid once more.
The new horizons space probe
reveals high-resolution images of Pluto for the first time.
Now, after years of research,
scientists are coming to some remarkable conclusions,
but this incredible little spacecraft isn't done yet.
Scientists know that Pluto isn't alone,
it's part of vast number of icy bodies
that surround the solar system known as the Kuiper belt.
As new horizons speeds past Pluto,
it sets its gaze on these new targets.
Could Pluto’s icy companions
reveal more secrets about our solar system?
New horizons sails past Pluto
at over 32,000 miles per hour.
It ventures deep into Pluto’s backyard,
a mysterious region of the solar system
known as the Kuiper belt.
The Kuiper belt is a band of material
that surrounds the planets, filled with giant icy comets
and other dwarf planets similar to Pluto.
We only know it exists thanks to faint dots of light
seen from earth's most powerful telescopes.
All these small icy bodies compose the Kuiper belt.
When I was a kid in school,
we didn't even know any of these existed
except for Pluto, so it really is the unknown.
Scientists are desperate to study
a small Kuiper belt object up close,
so with plenty of fuel left in new horizons' tank,
its engineers divert the robotic probe to study new targets.
Scientists hope this mission
will help them solve unanswered questions
about the very earliest history of our solar system.
Because the Kuiper belt is probably made of
primordial objects, that means objects that haven't changed
since the solar system formed,
in order to understand how our solar system formed,
what better way to do that than by going and looking
at objects that haven't changed since it did form?
In Boulder, Colorado, planetary scientist
Anne Verbiscer has new horizons' next target identified.
Ahead of the encounter,
she needs to collect as much data
about the object as possible to ensure the perfect fly-by.
It's totally unexplored territory,
so we don't know what this next target
is gonna look like up close.
Anne relies on a cosmic coincidence
to get vital data on the new object.
Each time it passes in front of background star,
the object casts a faint shadow on the surface of earth,
briefly revealing its size and shape.
The next shadow is predicted to fall in a few months' time.
It's a rare opportunity Anne's team needs
to grab with both hands.
So, here is a map of the world, and I can illustrate
where the shadow of the next new horizons target
is going to fall on the earth.
Anne's greatest challenge
is to ensure she has telescopes
in the right place at the right time
as the shadow of the event races over the earth.
The current predicted path
crosses the northern portion of south America
and moves over into Senegal, western Africa,
Mali, and Algeria.
The shadow is due to race across three continents,
so Anne prepares to send a group of telescopes
to each spot along the path.
She can't afford for bad weather or a technical failure
in one country to ruin the data.
One of Anne's most important tasks is to work out
how bright horizons' next target will be.
So, a successful observation on our next expedition
will also tell us the size of the next new horizons target,
and if you know the size, then you know how much light
is reflected... Is it really, really dark,
or is it bright, or somewhere in between?
This allows her to program the spacecraft's
camera settings well in advance to get perfectly exposed images.
Two months later, Anne and her team arrive in Senegal
to witness the big event.
They spend a day setting up and testing the telescopes,
and then, as night falls,
they wait for the mysterious silhouette
to pass in front of the background star.
The moment is brief, but even this tiny dimming
carries vital information for Anne to plan the perfect
new horizons fly-by and reveal our first ever close-up glimpse
of a Kuiper belt object beyond Pluto.
The team still has weeks of analysis ahead of them,
but already they believe they've made a tantalizing discovery.
This target may in fact be two objects locked together
in a close orbit with a combined span of 18.6 miles.
To be in the right place on earth
to watch an object blink out the light of a distant star
for only a second or so was nothing short of amazing.
Whatever revelations lie ahead, one thing is clear...
The further we explore, the more we learn
about our planetary backyard and our place in this cosmos.
We are now in one of these
golden eras of exploration.
There are parts of the solar system
we have just never been.
There is no way that there can't be huge mysteries
waiting out there for us.
New horizons gave the science community desire
but also the confidence to go and explore the Kuiper belt.
I hope that in the decades that follow,
we'll be back and back with a vengeance.
One tiny spacecraft has transformed Pluto
from a mysterious dwarf planet into an iconic world
in our solar system...
With ice volcanoes...
A self-healing heart...
And an atmosphere that reaches its moon...
But Pluto is just the start.
As new horizons ventures onwards
into the next frontier of the solar system,
who knows what further mysteries await.