Beyond the Edge
From Stardust to Pluto...and Beyond

by Robert Gounley

It’s been a busy week at Spaceport Earth so far: one landing and one scheduled departure.

The landing came at night and lit the skies of the Western United States.  It wasn’t a meteor, but the glowing aeroshell of a capsule bringing back pieces of a comet.  Two years earlier, the Stardust spacecraft captured specks of comet dust during a nail-biting passage through the coma of Comet Wild-2.  This week Stardust dropped off its package.  In doing so, its capsule became the fastest man-made object to ever pass through Earth’s atmosphere.  Scientists and engineers who operated Stardust for the past six years loudly cheered a successful landing.  Soon the particles brought back will make history themselves as scientists uncover clues to our Solar System’s birth.

Another spacecraft – New Horizons – launched on its journey to the planet Pluto.  It set records too.  Being a small passenger atop a really big rocket made it the fastest man-made object to ever leave the Earth.   It will make Pluto, 6 billion kilometers from the sun, the farthest object ever visited by a spacecraft – one of Earth’s, anyway.

In less than 10 years, we’ll see the first pictures of an unexplored planet since Voyager 2 flew by Neptune in 1989.  Scientists will cheer.  Space activists will cheer – especially those who lobbied for this mission to fly.  I’ll cheer, but I’ll also listen to what ordinary people are saying.

They may say planetary exploration is over.

In the popular imagination, Pluto is the edge of the Solar System.  If we could stand on that icy orb today and look Sunward, we’ll see the Earth and every planet whose names we learned as schoolchildren.  Beyond are the stars – far beyond. 

To some, that means we’ve seen it all.

Of course after New Horizon there will still be much in our Solar System to explore. Dozens of worlds will be unmarked by footprint or a rover’s tread.  Wonders aplenty remain to be found.  Thinking that we’ve come close to “seeing it all” makes as much sense as saying someone surveyed the Grand Canyon based on his or her view from a moving car.

Does this seem overly apprehensive?  Consider Apollo.  Dedicated space enthusiasts get a faraway look in their eyes whenever they hear the words, “one small step…”  Many others, far too many, routinely encapsulate the entire Apollo program with the catchphrase, “We can put men on the Moon, but…”

Those seven words have probably done more to diminish public support for space exploration that the sum of all political speeches on the topic for the last 30 years.  Anyone want to bet that someone won’t coin a new maxim to damn a successful Pluto mission with faint praise? 

Happily, recent astronomical discoveries may have come to the rescue.  Recently, scientists announced the discovery of a large object beyond the orbit of Pluto.  It’s been temporarily designated UB313 but has been informally nicknamed “Xena”.  Little is known about Xena, save that it has a moon (nicknamed “Gabrielle”) and that it is certainly bigger than Pluto.

Bigger than Pluto?  Farther than Pluto?  Perfect!  Let’s all start a buzz to explore these far outposts of the Solar System.  Perhaps the team operating New Horizon will find a way to send it to “Xena” after flying by Pluto (its understudy).  If they do, there are plenty of other recently discovered bodies in the region beyond Pluto called the Kuiper Belt.  They only need to be worked into the popular imagination the way Pluto was generations ago.

With luck, space activists can nudge the popular imagination farther and farther with new Kuiper Belt Objects.  Even the pundits will be frustrated by the futility of trying to capture such vastness with their limited imaginations.  If we succeed, perhaps we’ll agitate to extend Humanity’s reach very, very far indeed.

Alpha Centauri, anyone?

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