Pluto mission years in making

In 1989, the Pluto lobbying effort began.
Scripps Howard
Pushed by as much rocket power as humanity can deliver, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft bound for Pluto and the Kuiper Belt will be the fastest thing ever launched.
But the real engine behind New Horizons, scheduled for launch today from Cape Canaveral, Fla., is planetary scientist Alan Stern. The 48-year-old founder of the Southwest Research Institute's office in Boulder, Colo., is leading the $700 million mission.
Although personally incapable of propelling a 1,054-pound, piano-sized spacecraft to a speed of 36,000 mph, Stern has been described by more than one colleague as a "force of nature."
But he is mortal and has been swamped with technical meetings, government briefings and relentless press requests.
"Nothing in my life remotely parallels this, though I've been in the space business for a long time and involved in a lot of launches," Stern said.
Began his push
Stern was 32 and had just earned his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado when he began pushing for a mission to the solar system's last unexplored frontier. He will be 62 by the time New Horizons finishes its planned Kuiper Belt observations.
It all began in 1989, when he and other scientists launched their Pluto lobbying effort in an Italian restaurant in Baltimore. They called themselves the "Pluto Underground."
Stern went on to chair an official NASA working group on outer planets in the early-1990s. He was heavily involved with several canceled Pluto missions -- Pluto 350, Pluto Fast Flyby, Pluto Express -- before New Horizons finally stuck.
Years of effort by Stern and others laid the groundwork. But a NASA-commissioned study in 2002 proved to be the tipping point. It put exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt atop the list of planetary mission priorities for the next decade.
Viewed as outlier
Pluto, discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, was once viewed as an outlier in more than the literal sense.
The planet, just two-thirds the size of Earth's moon and with about 1/500th the mass of Earth, orbits between 30 and 50 times farther from the sun than Earth. Pluto's 248-year loop is tilted 17 degrees from the orbital plane shared by the other planets.
It perpetually faces its major moon Charon, half Pluto's size, as if in a permanent waltz, enough so that they are considered binary planets. Stern and Boulder colleagues recently announced their discovery of two new tiny Pluto moons.
Pluto is so small and distant that observing it from Earth is like looking at a grain of sand from a kilometer away, or counting spots on a soccer ball from 375 miles away, Stern wrote in his 1998 book "Pluto and Charon." Images of Pluto, even from the Hubble Space Telescope, are hopelessly pixilated.
But Pluto is not an oddball. Rather, it represents a vast scattering of frozen objects called the Kuiper Belt, theorized by Gerard Kuiper in the 1950s and discovered in 1992.
The Kuiper Belt contains perhaps 100,000 objects of 60-mile diameter or greater, including at least one, 2003 UB313, larger than Pluto.
New Horizons, built by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md., must travel for at least nine years before it can deliver news from Pluto across a gulf so vast it takes light more than four hours to cross.
Data will arrive via NASA's Deep Space Network to mission operations at the Applied Physics Laboratory.