New Horizons

[mmcirvin]

I decided to cover a bunch of other space news instead, but you probably heard that the Pluto probe New Horizons finally got launched over the past week and seems to be in good shape to fly past Pluto in 2015, with an option to encounter another Kuiper Belt object to be selected later. Unlike most of the US space missions I like to talk about, this isn't a JPL mission; it's instead run from Johns Hopkins University, like the NEAR Shoemaker probe that orbited and eventually landed on the asteroid Eros.

Recent discoveries mean that the old pitch for a Pluto probe as the exploration of "the last unexplored planet" no longer makes a lot of sense; either Pluto isn't a planet, or there are more of them. On the other hand, the identification of Pluto as an example of a whole class of objects, rather than a solitary oddball, means that it actually becomes a more interesting place to visit.

Some of these missions take so long to get where they're going that I imagine it would be difficult to work on them, given the time scale of an academic career (the same is true of the biggest experimental particle physics collaborations, though, since big accelerators take so long to build).

On the other hand, New Horizons makes a gravity-assist encounter with Jupiter just over a year from now, and should get in some good Jupiter observations then, so we won't have to wait until 2015 to get something out of it. The Galileo orbiter's stuck antenna and consequent bandwidth problems meant that it couldn't send back as many observations of Jupiter as originally planned, so these investigations by passing spacecraft in the process of using its enormous mass as a gravitational trebuchet are always welcome. I think that Cassini sent back more pictures of Jupiter during its own gravity-assist maneuver around New Year 2001 than Galileo did over its entire tour.

Comments

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

There may still be a few particle physicists out there who insist their grad students participate in every stage of an experiment from proposal to publication before they get their degree, but if so they're a justifiably endangered species. In fact the first experiment I worked on in my second postdoc was proposed before the experiment I got my doctoral degree on was. Proposal to publication was circa 15 years. That's atypically long of the medium energy experiments I've been working on; our newest publication is from an experiment proposed in 2000. But in the big collider physics collaborations, I think it's pretty much true that the people who design and build the apparatus have a fairly small overlap with the people who analyze the data.

The difference with space probes is, of course, that particle physics apparatus doesn't tend to abruptly disappear without a trace just before the experiment begins. Though we did have a detector explode once.