Glenn Marsch

America Visits Pluto

In 1989, America's Voyager 2 spacecraft performed a reconnaissance flyby of Neptune, the distant ice giant planet that orbits about three billion miles from the sun. I was in graduate school then, and I stayed up all night watching PBS's "Neptune All Night" broadcast of the images being sent from Voyager as it swept past Neptune and its retinue of moons. What a fascinating world this was! Neptune, a shimmering blue gem of a planet, had tremendously violent weather with 1,000-mph winds and huge, dark, brooding storms, something utterly unexpected for a planet so cold and so far from the sun. Alan Stern, a young scientist in 1989, knew we needed a mission to Pluto. He agitated for many years to fund a flyby of Pluto, and finally the New Horizons spacecraft was launched on a big Atlas V rocket, speeding away from the Earth at 35,000 mph.