The 'Pluto Underground,' as the planet’s scientific champions came to be known, campaigned for a resurrection ... Chasing New Horizons turns into a fascinating David versus Goliath story, with Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—the more experienced planetary probe maker with political weight—pitted against a relative newcomer, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory ... Even though we know the final outcome, the story continues to be a nail-biter as the New Horizons mission is canceled twice more. The two authors, with their insider’s perspective, capture the arduous process with great narrative verve.
The book begins 10 days before the planet’s closest approach to Earth when the New Horizons spacecraft suddenly shut itself down. From there, readers are taken back to the conception of a mission to Pluto and on to its eventual triumphal flyby. All of this is told in exhilarating prose that moves this narrative briskly along without getting mired in the tall weeds of technical jargon. One of the great joys of Chasing New Horizons is that it takes for granted that the reader is smart and can follow the few technical points.
With all of the difficulties in the way of the mission, you would think a sense of doom and angst would permeate the story, but it never does. In fact, it’s marked by an overriding sense of unbreakable optimism ... The book is inspiring.
Pluto, now downgraded to the status of a dwarf planet, is billions of miles away from Earth, a fraction of Earth's mass, receives a sliver of Earth's sunlight, and is almost inconceivably cold. The chances that humans will ever establish a base there are correspondingly minuscule ... Stern and Grinspoon concentrate on the heroism of learning, specifically the dogged, day-to-day heroism of the men and women behind the New Horizons spacecraft that in July of 2015 made the first-ever close fly-by of tiny frozen Pluto and sent back large amounts of invaluable data to the specialists who had nervously watched the crafts progress for years.
Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, offer ringside views of the exploration of the outer solar system, from the discovery more than two hundred years ago of planets beyond Saturn to the launch in 2006 of NASA’s New Horizons space mission to study Pluto’s environs ... Chasing New Horizon reveals the inside story of the mission’s failures and successes ... [a] gripping history ... Grinspoon recounts the entire journey, from the launch to a brief but alarming silence a mere ten days before the flyby, when the team lost contact with the probe.
Chasing New Horizons offers a fascinating look at what it took to make New Horizons a reality. There is some discussion of the science of the mission, but the focus is on the development of the mission itself, and the reward that came from decades of work and a realization of a vision to explore a distant world.
Stern and Grinspoon’s record of this epic project is thoroughly captivating; as a bonus for die-hard space buffs, the authors include an appendix that lists the top 10 scientific discoveries from the New Horizons Pluto mission. Suffused with serpentine theatrics and scientific wonder, this is a consistently compelling, top-notch documentation of intrepid planetary exploration.
Stern’s hands-on and passionate involvement with the project from its inception enables him to make potentially dull material...as interesting as the science ... This is a future classic of popular science, full of twists and turns and unexpected heroes (a teenager’s passion for Pluto helped influence NASA administrators at a crucial moment), with a dramatic and profound payoff.
