CHAPTER 1 THE VOYAGE BEGINS July 14 2015 was an exciting day for astronomers After traveling through space for more than nine years the New Horizons probe had finally reached Pluto It was the first time in history that a probe had visited the dwarf planet Sending a spacecraft to Pluto was not easy Scientists first thought of a mission to Pluto in the 1960s and 1970s They planned for the spacecraft to visit other planets along the way New Horizons was launched into space using an Atlas rocket V
Scientists called the mission a Grand Tour of the solar system The spacecraft was designed to visit Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune and Pluto However sending a spacecraft to multiple planets proved difficult Voyager 1 visited Saturn in 1979 and Jupiter in 1980 Between 1979 and 1989 the Voyager 2 spacecraft went to Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune But a voyage to Pluto would have to wait In 1989 another group of astronomers began working on a mission to Pluto Building and launching a spacecraft takes hundreds of millions of dollars Every part of the spacecraft must be tested Plus scientists must try to anticipate potential problems Once a spacecraft is in space it can be difficult or even impossible to fix The scientists had to convince a space agency to help pay for their spacecraft They suggested a
C icalens New Horizons team members conducted a practice run of the probe's launch in 2005 mission to Pluto many times in the 1990s But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA had other priorities Finally in 2001 NASA chose a project idea called New Horizons to move to the next phase of development That phase involved figuring out the price design and schedule The New Horizons mission was officially approved in the spring 2003 of
