Godspeed, New Horizons! Hello Pluto! And Thank You, Alan Stern!

Credit unknown. I stole it shamelessly from Twitter.

Love is in the air! There's nothing quite like tuning into CNN to get my usual news fix and seeing friend and colleague Alan Stern talking about New Horizon's Pluto fly-by tomorrow. Way to go! (Alan and I were interviewed on CNN's little sister network HLN a few years back about planetary exploration, but CNN is the big leagues and way cooler.) The news media seem to especially love Pluto's newly imaged heart-shaped surface feature, and so do I. It's like Pluto knew that its controversial image needed a make-over and became adorable to us again. Kidding, of course.

It's impossible to talk about New Horizons without mentioning Alan. He is the mover and shaker, the champion, the frontman for the mission. He has a tremendous talent to start conversations and get us excited. When I met him five years ago, my immediate reaction was to ask him how he got to do such cool things! I was so impressed. He still is involved in many cool things, some of which I've had the privilege of participating in. I had no part in New Horizons, I just think it's awesome.

My experience with New Horizons began before I met Alan. I saw the Atlas V rocket launch during my last semester of undergraduate at Florida Institute of Technology in January 2006. We were allowed to gather on the roof of the new Physical Sciences Building to watch it together as a department. Surprisingly, it was the first rocket launch I viewed from campus. I don't have a photo of the launch. I didn't own a smartphone back then; I had a Motorola Razr flip phone (remember those?), so snapping photos was less convenient.

Not my photo. My Razr couldn't take this shot. - January 19, 2006

To be honest, New Horizons wasn't on my radar until I coincidentally ran into Alan in Washington, D.C. last July when I was in town for a conference and heard him give a talk at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. It was only then that I realized that closest approach to Pluto was only a year away! I also then realized that many of my former planetary science classmates and NASA interns had been snatched up as part of the science team, and I had fun catching up with them that evening. Small world in the planetary science community!

Since last July, I've been psyched to see what Pluto has in store for us. As any planetary scientist will tell you, Pluto is an interesting dwarf planet, no less worthy of study since the debate over its classification or perhaps even more worthy of study because of it. Science isn't a democracy and nature doesn't care what words we assign to phenomena. Pluto is just as fascinating and scientifically important to us now as it was when New Horizons was proposed.

Much has been written about how the International Astronomical Union's 2006 definition is bizarre and fundamentally flawed. I don't know a single scientist who uses that definition. As a trained planetary scientist and astrophysicist myself, I could never use a definition of a planet that can be disproven with Earth as an example. That definition was simply bad science that got a lot of public attention. Science is never decided by vote, only by logic and evidence. Science is never decided, actually, it is always in flux as we learn more about the world around us. New Horizons is giving us so much new information on the Pluto system.

I had hoped to join Alan in Maryland this week for the official fly-by celebrations. I was supposed to be in California this week, but alas, some things don't go according to plan. And so, I watch the internet as so many others are doing, hanging on to every new announcement. Tomorrow I'll join a local PlutoPalooza celebration and party with the rest of the Pluto-loving Space Coast. Godspeed, New Horizons! Hello Pluto! And thank you, Alan Stern!

Pluto and one of its moons, Charon - July 8, 2015